MIT Brings Science & Technology Courses to Your Home

Five years ago, MIT launched an ambitious initiative with its OpenCourseWare project. The concept was fairly simple. It involved putting online the materials from MIT courses — the syllabi, reading lists, course notes, assignments, etc. — and making them available online to the world at large. Benefiting from this initiative were students and faculty across the globe, all looking to find guidance on how to teach themselves, or their students, the latest in their particular academic field. By early this year, MIT had online materials for 1,285 courses and was receiving 36,000 daily visits to the OpenCourseWare site. A success by all counts.

If there was a downside to the MIT initiative, it was that the OpenCourseWare materials lacked media elements that really let teachers and students see how a course was taught. It’s one thing to get the course materials, but quite another to see the materials in action. These days, MIT has filled that gap by adding audio and video components to a number of courses. (You can review the full list here.) With this addition, you can now see a variety of MIT courses in action, ranging from biology to physics to genomic medicine to animal behavior. They’re worth a look.

For more online materials from top-notch universities, see our full list. University Online Courses & Online Media.