What Are Your Earliest Memories of MIT Open Courseware?

OEGlobal 2026
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Next week is a huge milestone celebration on campus at MIT, the 25th Anniversary of the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare, see the event details including how to participate online.

Do you remember the first time you heard about MIT OCW? Or visited the web site (still at the same URL 25 years later)? Do you remember hearing about it at conferences or reading it in magazines/journals?

Please reply with any memories or first experiences with MIT OCW, as an educator or better yet, as a student. Bonus points for shared links and photos.

MIT OCW web sites comparing an inset of what it looked like in 2002 and what it looks like currently in 2026
MIT OCW web sites comparing an inset of what it looked like in 2002 and what it looks like currently in 20261800×1055 200 KB

Inset is MIT OpenCourseWare web site from October 14, 2002 earliest snapshot from the Internet Archive atop the current web site https://ocw.mit.edu

Add your OCW memories as a reply below.

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I started this topic, so I will go first :wink:

I would guess the news of MIT’s 2001 announcement was shared in listservs, and I would be very confident that Stephen Downes @Downes would have published something very early; I did find one of his posts about OCW from November 2002.

In March 2005 I was fortunate to have been invited to visit MIT by Philip Long when he was there; it was quite a thrill given I came from the Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona. I did take a few photos around campus, and did find the “office” door to OCW on the second floor od building 9!

Imgur
The Halls of OCW flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I did find in my blog an old post that indicates later in August 2005, I got to attend the EDUCAUSE Seminars in Academic Computing meeting that was held up in the mountains of Snowmass, Colorado. In fact, my post indicates I heard the Clair Maple Address by OCW’s leader Presodent Emeritus Charles M. Vest - the title was “OpenCourseWare and the Emerging Global Meta University”

The post includes notes that colleague Cyprien Lomas (then at UBC) and I collaboratively compiled in a shared “SubEthaEdit.” Because it’s a thing I like to do, with some searching today I was able to find a link to the abstract of talk itself, the full proceedings of other talks at the same conference PLUS with more digging, I found a recording of the talk tucked away in the Internet Archive that is missing from the EDUCAUSE site.

Okay, it’s your turn. Do you remember the first time you heard about MIT’s OpenCourseWare?

And also tagging in our OCW colleagues @shiras @sehansen @cjnewton (and soon Brandon) to help draw in more replies.

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Thanks so much @cogdog for opening up this thread. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been with MIT OpenCourseWare since 2004. Around the time its first 50-course publication pilot went live in fall 2002, I was freelance writing and had done a couple of pieces for MIT Technology Review magazine. I pitched my editor there on doing a story about this awesome new project, which they rejected because they’d already assigned a staff writer to cover it. So be it. But soon thereafter I decided it was time to get a fulltime job again, and OCW’s inspiring mission was absolutely top of mind as the place I wanted to work. I definitely didn’t fit the mold for staff openings they had at the time, but persistence finally paid off. From day one working here, it’s been deeply satisfying, I think exceeding the impact of everyone’s wildest expectations, and especially gratifying to see the global open education movement keep growing in its transformative work.