MIT Open CourseWare is five years old. In this short time period the project has become remarkably popular. The idea is simple: online, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) makes literally all of its undergraduate and graduate syllabi freely available. This is a commendable act at a time when more and more educators hide their syllabi behind password-shielded walls. Many users of MIT Open Courseware (OCW) in developing countries who left testimonials on the OCW website are highly enthusiastic about the project. But where are the critics?

My concern is not so much with the project itself but rather with the language that is used to describe and contextualize it. To believe that this initiative would enable the international re-location of power through the free distribution of knowledge (as claimed by the creators) perhaps overestimates its potential. OCW can be accessed predominantly in English despite the fact that there are attempts to translate the project. Worldwide Internet access is limited by all means. MIT clearly portrays itself as offering a huge gift to the world.

Richard Coyne writes in response Marcel Mauss' notion of the gift that "the society of the gift also resonates with McLuhan's account of social transformation brought about by electronic communications, and is classically utopian." Can social transformation be attributed to digital communication is a related question that Coyne raises. Does offering knowledge online automatically mitigate global knowledge discrepancies?

In his First Monday essay "Lessons from Open Source: Intellectual Property and Courseware" Jan Newmarch argues for open course ware such as MIT OCW. He writes:

"In this competitive age, universities are seeking ways to protect their intellectual property, for fear that it might be stolen or used by others without financial benefit coming back to the university. Increasingly, universities are using mechanisms of secrecy to secure their property."

Newmarch argues that this approach is wrong both, from a moral and a business perspective. I agree. Public universities are building on tax money and thus have the duty to contribute the produced knowledge back to the public domain. In addition, the politics of visibility that comes with Google's search engine results allows universities to become more present in public awareness.

MIT OCW makes the private institution MIT turn up in many more searches compared to the times prior to MIT OCW's inception. Newmarch suggests "If a university can make its courseware hold the public perception in an area, then its advertising is more effective than that of other universities." MIT's act of openness benefits this corporate institution tremendously on a cultural and financial level. The proceeds of openness.

The rhetoric of "5 years of educating the world" sounds all too philanthropic. Richard Coyne describes "internet generosity [as] a cheap form of altruism" in which it is possible to give and still retain the gift. Information is accessed, and files may be copied but all this knowledge is still available to the institution after it is accessed or copied. The perception of MIT OCW as a snow-white benevolent, purely altruistic gesture misses out on some, perhaps a little more hidden dynamics of the project. The gift is presented in the form of educational material that "outgifts" most academic rivals. It enters an open contest of giving. The MIT OCW About page states that "MIT OCW would not be possible without the support and generosity of the MIT faculty who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge to benefit others." It this an act of giving without receiving? A community college would hardly benefit from such act of openness. "One gives in ecxess in order for the opponent to reach the limit of his or her giving, and to be incapacitated or shamed" and "Failure to reciprocate indicates defeat, suggests loss of status, and in archaic societies requires ritualized restitution." writes Coyne. A private institution such as MIT thus establishes a hierarchy within the self-interested gift exchange and re-inscribes its market leadership. Each course syllabus adapted by a school in India, for example, becomes an advertisement for MIT. It increases its visibility. Students and faculty worldwide become attracted to the institution through the visibility of its syllabus repository. While MIT OCW contributes to the de-commodification of knowledge, it simultaneously inscribes itself in a hierarchy of exchange. In the transaction of giving the gift giver places herself in a hierarchical position, gaining much financial and cultural capital. Richard Coyne, quoting Bataille, points out that "the gift, particularly in its manifestation as potlatch, bears the seeds of class struggle and oppression. [...] The ostentation of the potlach is the reserve of the aristocracy, who truly have the means to squander."

In addition, at least in the fields of media art, I could not find much useful material when browsing through MIT OCW databases. This may, admittedly, drastically different in disciplines such as engineering. In the before mentioned area of my interest I could barely find supporting course materials (lecture notes, assignments, etc).

Furthermore, MIT OCW's "course mine" is non-participatory. Scholars in a given field cannot add, or correct the listed material. MIT OCW does not live up to the promise of an open source approach. In the open source software development a group of programmers can collectively fix bugs because the code is openly accessible and hence the product becomes more stable. Experts all over the world could contribute to  MIT OCW and improve on it. They could add resources and perhaps edit, and correct existing knowledge chunks.

Additional open courseware project include H20, and Connexions. Both of these projects allow for collaborative authorship. They encourage users to improve on each others entries. Individual knowledge production is challenged by the opportunity to cooperate. Power relations based on access to knowledge are challenged. People searching for materials have the possibility to find relevant, up-to-date texts and resources like videos or audio material in these free and accessible knowledge pools.

"Academics have more to lose in the copyright wars than most people do. We are not only the source of much of the "content" in the world. We are -- through our teaching and research -- among the major conduits and consumers of the content that others provide. We have a vested interest in keeping information flowing as cheaply, widely, and quickly as possible. We need a rich, diverse, affordable, and accessible information ecosystem to do our jobs."

I agree with Vaidhyanathan. An attitude of sharing material, distributing it and giving open access to knowledge is crucial. Jon Newmark argues that

"Universities are often held as some sort of moral pinnacle of knowledge discovery and learning. Universities hold a privileged position as collectors and dispensers of knowledge. They are expected to maintain an unbiased and open view on current knowledge.

With increasing commercial forces acting upon universities, it is widely seen as regrettable that these forces may be acting to dilute the open nature of universities. That is, hiding information for commercial reasons is seen to be against the common good, an argument which particularly applies to government funded institutions."

The issue of open content licenses is addressed in a booklet by Lawrence Liang with the title "Guide to open content licenses" that can be downloaded as pdf here. How do the creators of such research contexts such MITOCW account for copyright? The answers vary but often include the Creative Commons License. Out of the 16 Creative Commons Licenses the one that is frequently used only requires the acknowledgment of the original authors and permits commercial use.

While MIT OCW is a rich and valuable project, some of these more critical considerations about the perhaps technoromantic rhetoric of the project should also be brought up at its 5th birthday party.