[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?

[Fred Beshears]

Greetings,

Here's something that caught my eye in the NY Times.

According to a recent item in the NY Times, MIT is thinking of putting it's
Open CourseWare materials behind a paywall (see blurb and link below).

All the more reason for getting behind Dick Durbin's Open College Textbook
act, which calls for government funding to support the creation and
maintenance of electronic textbooks that would be in the public domain (see
http://durbin.senate.gov/showRelease.cfm?releaseId=318279).

Back in 2007, I testified before a House sub-committee that was looking into
the cost of textbooks. I believe that committee's report gave Durbin the
incentive to put forward the bill. Unfortunately, I believe the textbook
lobby has been able to scuttle attempts to move the bill forward. In any
event, here's one of my blog posts that covers most of what I presented to
the sub-committee.

The Economic Case for Creative Commons Textbooks
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2010/09/case-for-creative-commons-textbooks.html

Best,
Fred Beshears


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/education/27iht-educBriefs27.html?ref=education

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced that it is
considering charging for access to online lectures and class notes, which
are currently available free on the Web.

Speaking at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/organization_for_economic_cooperation_and_development/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s
Institutional Management in Higher Education conference in Paris this month,
Lori Breslow, director of M.I.T.’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, said
that free access “may not be the best economic model, so we are now looking
seriously at new e-learning opportunities.”

Long a leader in the Open Course Ware movement, which provides free and open
access to high-quality educational materials, M.I.T. has come under
increasing financial pressure because of the fall in the value of its
endowment.

From a high of $10.1 billion in 2008, M.I.T.’s endowment has shrunk to $7.6
billion. According to University World News, an online newsletter, putting
courses behind a paywall is one of a number of measures designed to deliver
$150 million in cuts over the 2009-12 period.* — D.D. GUTTENPLAN*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://deimos.cs.athabascau.ca/mailman/private/oer-community/attachments/20101009/774f5fd2/attachment.html