MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that freely publishes educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate courses online, with no enrollment, account, or fee required. Announced on April 4, 2001, the project grew out of the MIT Council on Education Technology and was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT itself. Materials are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, allowing users to freely modify, remix, and reuse content with attribution.

As of May 2018, over 2,400 courses were available spanning every MIT department and degree program, each typically including a syllabus, lecture notes or reading lists, and assignments or exams. Since its inception, the platform has been accessed by over 500 million learners worldwide, and in 2005 OCW helped launch what is now Open Education Global, a network of over 300 higher education institutions sharing open educational resources.

MIT OCW sits within MIT Open Learning and is sustained by a combination of MIT institutional support (roughly half its budget) and donor contributions, with a median gift of $25. The initiative has also paved the way for related MIT platforms such as MITx, MicroMasters, and the Open Learning Library. Innovations in open, scalable, or AI-assisted learning are directly relevant to OCW's mission of maximizing global access to high-quality educational content.