There's this consistent vision. MIT has asked itself, in the words of T.S. Eliot, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" And the consistent thing about MIT is MIT has been willing to say, "Yes." Thank you all for joining us here today. As president of MIT, I've come to expect top-level, innovative, and intellectually entrepreneurial ideas from the MIT community. Today, the word democratize seems very clichéd. We invented that with knowledge, and I think it's a profound thing.

We went into this expecting that something creative and cutting-edge and challenging would emerge. Something that would be consistent with MIT's mission. But I must admit that OpenCourseWare is not exactly what I had expected. This idea started in 1999, 2000. And people would say, "There's this thing called the internet.

What is MIT going to do about it?" It was sort of a feeding frenzy on the possibilities of profiting from knowledge. The prevailing idea then was this is a gold mine for universities to publish their stuff and market it. Part of the response was to create this educational technology council. The proposal on the table was that MIT could enter into the space by offering small modules [snorts] packaged as a maybe at that time a CD or some medium like that.

Whether it could go beyond that, we weren't sure. And the financial model conclusion was it wouldn't work unless we do it at some scale. And at the end of the day, it's really not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The question was, "What can we do that really reflects MIT's values of leadership, of impact, of excellence?" The key person really was Dick Yue. He's the one who really had the initial idea. I know exactly where I was. I was at home, what I was doing. My wife remember where it was.

He was getting some food out of his refrigerator thinking about all of this. And suddenly occurred to him saying, "Why don't we just give it away?" I've heard it different ways. Hal told us the story, and I don't know if it's the right story. I was on the exercise bike at home. I think I was on exercise bike. Just came to my mind, "How about we make something big, and we give it away?"

It sounded crazy cuz nobody did that. That was where OpenCourseWare came about, that we would give it away. We won't make a dime, but we would get impact. OpenCourseWare is a web-based program that will provide free access to primary materials for virtually every course at MIT. I remember hearing about OpenCourseWare when it first got announced. And we're like, "Yes, this is so right.

This is so much what MIT is about." It literally almost took my breath away. I thought it was stunning. No one was open licensing content at that point in time, let alone full courses. It was breakthrough thinking in a lot of different ways. It was a pretty long time of you making sure there's real support from the faculty. And a lot of hearing, you know, both enthusiasm and just a lot of skepticism. If students can go get this stuff on the web, why do they need to come

get a university education? People said, "Oh my god, you're giving your crown jewels away." And many said, "No, we're not because what is our crown jewel is thinking, it's reasoning, it's creating new knowledge. The knowledge itself should be made available." I mean, the sheer vision of that is pretty incredible, actually. We have institutions like MIT, and they can only serve a limited population. But if you can take the things that are fundamental to how a faculty member here teaches, many other students can be affected.

The first time ever that my intro to development class was put on OCW, I think that very year I taught more students than I had ever taught before. We taught this course on advanced graduate-level deep learning. In just 2 months, hundreds of thousands of people engaged with the content online. The fact that something that we worked so hard to build can spread so far beyond this institution's doors, I think is amazing.

We were able to grow in terms of courses very steadily, but it was one course at a time, one faculty member at a time. Growth though in terms of users was exponential. The OCW YouTube channel with its 6 million subscribers is the most subscribed YouTube channel from any dot edu out there. So, an indication of just the kind of global hunger for knowledge. It's about empowering people to actually use this technology to improve their lives and improve the world.

I first came upon OCW when I was about 14 years old. I'm originally from Ukraine, and when the war started, I was trying to find an opportunity to learn more beyond high school's curriculum. I think I started with calculus one. My English wasn't that good back in the day, but I was trying to grasp what the professor was drawing on the board. And that is just 1 over 101. Then as I learned English more, I became a big user of the platform. I remember my first interaction with this. I was looking up something on YouTube. And then I see results of an AI class in MIT, and I remember asking myself, "Which MIT is this? This can't be the MIT.

Why would they give stuff for free?" OCW became this stepping stone. And right now, I'm a first-year student here, and I'm deeply grateful for that. If you can inform someone and give them that knowledge and help them make better decisions as people, multiply that factor 1,000 times, and you know, you're building a better world, in my opinion. It's not only us putting out stuff that other people can use for free. It's to encourage other people to improve and build on it.

One of the cool things about using MIT's OCW is being able to go in there and use what works or using it as a starting point and then adding a bunch of examples. Somebody gets more, the other person has to get less. That we could use them in a way that actually makes sense to the things basically students need to know. Me and a few other students, we got this idea that we can translate OCW materials into first Ukrainian and then maybe other languages.

They were really welcoming for us to translate their materials. It's always good to ask, "How could it fail?" For most of the courses we've done, it's caption translation, but also there is one specific course where we translated audio, and you can turn on the toggle, and Professor will speak Ukrainian. It maintains her natural pace, her tone, and is very fascinating. Our most popular courses tend to be in calculus and physics and learning to program. Let's look at what this code's supposed to do. But a vitally important part of the education at MIT is the integration of other disciplines

across the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. People might not realize that there's a pretty vibrant set of physical education experiences reflected on OpenCourseWare such as videos about scuba diving and archery. President Vest's vision was always that OpenCourseWare would be a permanent part of MIT. And for that to happen, we had to make sure that it delivered real value to MIT. One of the way in which we're using the OpenCourseWare material is as part of flipped classroom. Students listen to the video at home. And when they come to class, my students do case studies. So, OpenCourseWare material is used as

very, very, very, very rich textbook in a way. I work with many PhD students. And every year two or three of my students would not be at MIT if it wasn't for OCW. They learned maybe linear algebra, quantum mechanics, and so forth, increasing their aspirations to proceed further in science and technology. So, in addition to helping people, it also helped MIT because it definitely attracted people that would ordinarily not be here. It's a face that launched a thousand ships.

A lot of later online efforts look back to OpenCourseWare and say, "That was the model." OpenCourseWare was a big part of my thinking of like, "Well, you know what? If MIT can stand on this principle that certain things should just be free and available to the world, I want to stand for that same principle." So, there's a direct through line from what MIT did with OpenCourseWare to the existence of Khan Academy. This is also maybe my origin story with open education because when I was going to start going to college, you know, in my early 20s, you know, 6 years not thinking about math at all. Like, I didn't remember

anything. I didn't remember how to add fractions. And so, I actually very heavily used things like Khan Academy to kind of get me back up to speed. And for someone who was kind of taking this not straightforward path, it was vital. OCW was a pioneer in making educational resources available to the public. The whole open education resources movement has led to thousands of open textbooks and many, many open courses that are available on the web. I've been teaching with almost exclusively open education resources for like 10 years now.

It's really made me think about some things differently because, you know, education is a human right. Everybody has a right to learn, not just people who can afford to pay for it. If we democratize education, we will have those future geniuses who can push society forward. I envision the future where we combine multimodal data in a more global way in languages that are not only English, but multiple others. is what we call speed. Having a trusted source like OpenCourseWare is critical for the future.

And we at MIT are committed to maintain that. Courage is not when you do something because you know it's going to work. Courage is when you do something because you're doing it because it's right. Um and you know there are risks. I mean, there's something very profound about our ability as an institution collectively to take the risk when we make these forays. If we ever say we won't do something because that's too risky, that's not the MIT brand. And in fact, it will take us away from the very thing that brought us to where we are. What do you think's next for OpenCourseWare and open education?

What is the next 10 years for OpenCourseWare is going to be an adventure. I certainly don't know exactly where this will lead, just as we didn't really know 10 years ago where it would lead. But it's incumbent on all of us to think hard about it. And it's incumbent on OCW to listen a lot to its users around the world for clues to where we could most productively go because it's impacted the lives of a huge number of people in ways you couldn't possibly have envisioned.