Started in 2001, MIT kicked off the furthest reaching educational initiative the world has ever seen with it’s OpenCourseWare Project. Since then the program has seen tremendous growth, but is on the verge of running out of money. Through the MIT OCW the institution offers syllabi, lecture notes, exams, problem sets and more from over 2000 of their courses. You can even create and join online study groups through OpenStudy.

Below I have included an awesome infographic depicting MIT OCW’s growth from launch to 2007 (delivering content to over 37 million visitors!), as well as highlighted some data points around their growth from 2009 and 2010.

Here are some high level numbers for 2010 from a blog post:

  • 17.5 M visits
  • 9.6 M visitors
  • 1.82 visits per visitor
  • 98.3 M page views (actually a little lower than last year, but a sign our site redesign is helping folks to find content faster)
  • 5.63 page views per visit
  • 1.9 M zip files downloaded
  • 11.8 M files downloaded from iTunes U
  • 7.3 M videos viewed on YouTube
  • 275 K visits from the MIT community (from GA, not WebTrends; WT is not reading this one right)
  • 446 K visits referred by StumbleUpon; 172 K by Reddit; 112 K by Wikipedia; 95 K by YouTube; 78 K by Facebook
  • 38% of visits used Firefox; 33% used IE; 15% used Chrome; 10% used Safari

Here are some high level numbers for 2009 from a blog post:

  • 15+ million visits
  • 9+ million visitors
  • 100+ million page views (not counting PDF views)

UPDATE: I caught up with Stephen Carson the External Relations Director for MIT OCW and was able to grab a few more stats:

Year          Visits                Visitors            Page Views
2004     4,573,356        2,506,316     41,222,413
2005     5,287,104        3,453,305     48,450,698
2006     7,235,514        4,777,923     60,791,654
2007     13,430,957     9,417,711      101,548,322
2008     12,977,190     8,707,982     95,773,646
2009     15,089,817     9,117,960      102,547,404
2010     17,453,610     9,614,069      98,336,893
In an email Steve wrote:
These are the complete full-year totals for the project.  ’07 was an exceptional year because we completed the initial publication of the OCW curriculum that year and had a significant milestone celebration event (http://ocw.mit.edu/about/our-history/milestone-celebration/) which generated a lot of coverage.   We redesigned our site in September 09, which caused a drop in our page views per visit, a good thing since we are helping people to find content more quickly, but caused our page view numbers for this year to drop.
We are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year, and the OCW Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org) will be meeting May 4-6 on the MIT campus.  We also have a couple of new and ongoing projects including the OpenStudy groups on some of our courses (which now have around 10,000 participants), an iPhone app for our video lecture content, an new section of our site highlighting MIT’s new energy minor, and a few other things.

Lastly a few highlights from our coverage of MIT OCW and find out how you can help keep MIT OCW alive:

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