Via American Scientist:
MIT’s OpenCourseWare project began in 1999, when provost Robert Brown charged the school’s Council on Education Technology with finding a space in the distance learning market. Spearheaded by computer science professor Hal Abelson, the project launched a pilot site in 2002 with 32 courses, and a year later the university published its 500th course online. Today the total count approaches 2,000.
The initiative, which provides reading lists, lecture notes, homework assignments and sometimes even streamed video lectures, stops well short of providing a full free MIT degree, but it supports the school’s mission to advance knowledge and to serve the nation and the world.
It’s an amazingly rich and generous resource. Users can access the courses online, download them for offline use, adopt them as teaching resources and even modify and redistribute them (noncommercially, and with credit). The course list ranges from history and literature to statistical thermodynamics and computational geometry—nearly all the courses in the catalog—and many are even offered in translation. MIT’s program is a leader in the open educational resource movement, which seeks to create a global intellectual commons, and it’s an example to be admired.
Browse the courses here.