CEMaT Ed Tech Connection

Looking for a challenge?  Looking to further your knowledge over the holidays?  Want to learn more about Language Acquisition, New Media Literacies, Chinese, or Cognitive Processes?  Check out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) web site where you can access course materials like lecture notes, demonstration videos, and problem sets from over 1800 of the university’s courses, all for FREE.  According to MIT, over 1 million learners visit each month from all around the world.  21% of site traffic comes from East Asia/ Pacific (6 million visits since 2004);  19% of the visitors are from Europe / Central Asia (5.3 million visits since 2004); the bulk of the others hits come from North America (39%, 11 million since 2004).  

MIT’s OCW has mainly 3 types of learner-visitors:
Self-learners = 49%
Students = 32%
Educators = 16% 

One student wrote, “I’ve graduated from high school, but I’ve been accessing the OCW since I was in the first year. In a developing country, it’s quite difficult to access good course materials. Thank you very much, OCW has given a lot of advantages in my education process.”
– Grace, Indonesia 

Global access to this kind of learning material supports the idea of the Internet as a flattener of the world.  Valid, relevant, high quality content is ubiquitous.  

Important Notes from MIT:
- OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
- OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
- Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.