The MIT OpenCourseWare enables people with an Internet connection and a Web browser to access the syllabus, lecture notes, exams and answers, and in some cases, even the videotaped lectures of 32 MIT courses.
So far, more than 130,000 Web visitors from around the world have plugged into the pilot, tapping into a vein of information for which MIT undergraduates pay $26,960 per year for tuition.
By the 2006-2007 school year, MIT plans to publish the course materials for virtually all of its 2,000 graduate and undergraduate courses.
The move to put the materials online stems from a multiyear effort by the MIT faculty to forge a unified approach to online access to its classes. The faculty's efforts picked up pace while two related Internet phenomena--distance learning and open-source software--were gathering steam.
MIT embraced a comparison to the open-source model, in which the source code for both grass-roots and corporate software titles is published, developed and licensed free of charge.