In the last 10 years the MIT OpenCourseWare project has given 100 million people access to over 50,000 individual resources including documents, video, audio, simulations, animations and sample programming code drawn from over 2,000 courses. More than 80% of MIT’s faculty members have voluntarily shared their teaching materials through OCW. In just 2010 MIT OCW delivered content to over 10 million people.

The project’s impact has by far exceeded the expectations of the faculty who first proposed the effort back in 2001, and they are looking for a much greater impact in the next 10 years. MIT has set an ambitious agenda in the next decade for the MIT OCW project to reach one billion minds.

“It’s quite humbling for us to see the impact OpenCourseWare has had,” says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who chairs the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and was on the original faculty panel that first proposed the program. “We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes, and tapped into a much larger need around the world.  Millions of people have come to the site for the chance to learn, even without credit offered or access to faculty.”

In the next decade, in addition to publishing MIT’s core academic materials, MIT OCW will undertake a series of initiatives designed to magnify the impact of the program through a focus of four key areas of innovation:

• OCW will continue to collaborate to make OCW’s materials widely available on the web through affiliate sites and mobile channels. MIT OCW recently launched an iPhone app.
• OCW will undertake projects to make the materials more useful to key audiences, like High School Students.
• OCW will seek to create communities of open learning around MIT’s content, like OpenStudy.
• The OCW team will focus on making the content more adoptable and adaptable for educators everywhere, helping them to share OCW content with their students.

“Our ambition is to increase the impact of OCW by an order of magnitude,” says Professor Dick Yue, who chaired the committee that proposed OCW and also advises the program.  “If we’ve reached 100 million people in our first ten years, we want to reach a billion in the next ten.  If a million educators used our content in their classrooms so far, we hope to help 10 million use the content in our next decade.”

In May of this year, MIT will cohost the annual meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium on the MIT campus, welcoming 300 representatives of leading OCW programs from around the world.