The introduction to the book was written by former University president William Bowen GS ’58, who said that there are “a variety of incentives” for universities to increase public access to their educational resources.
“[MIT] providing courses online was part of its education mission,” he said. “Their worldwide reputation was enhanced ... The public always benefits when there are new ways of disseminating knowledge.”
However, compared to some of its peers, Princeton has yet to develop the same scale of online interactive and educational materials.
Though Yale offers entire lecture courses for download on iTunes U, a section of the iTunes store which offers free access to materials from institutions of higher education, Princeton’s offerings on its iTunes account and on the University’s YouTube channel consist mainly of occasional public lectures and public relations and informational videos. Both the iTunes and YouTube accounts are run by the University’s Office of Communications.
The University’s Office of Information and Technology also maintains an official WebMedia site that offers some archived lectures and streaming video of live events.
Despite the disparity between the online presence of other universities’ educational offerings and Princeton’s, Bowen said that Princeton should “not necessarily” feel obligated to improve in this area. He noted that for universities such as Yale or MIT, which offer more extensive online access to academic programs, “providing courses online was part of [their] education mission.” This ideology may not be the case for other universities.
University spokeswoman Emily Aronson cited the Princeton’s focus on an intimate campus environment as a disincentive for publicizing academic courses.
“We generally do not record academic course lectures, largely because of the residential nature of our campus that promotes the intimate in-class learning experience,” she said.
Though Princeton’s current focus may not be on public accessibility of course material, Princeton was one of the first to offer online course access when it partnered with Oxford, Stanford and Yale in early 2001 to create a fee-based offering of online courses called AllLearn. Princeton withdrew from the program at the end of the year after concluding that the business model was unworkable, which ultimately proved true: The program closed in 2006.
Cost is also a major factor in an economic climate where nearly all universities are operating on tighter budgets. The resources needed to produce content for free — MIT’s program costs up to $4 million per year — are often provided in the university’s operating budget or funded through private and external philanthropy.
Despite the costs, however, as Walsh explains in her book, there are several advantages for universities to offer increased access to their educational resources. The growing number of schools willing to offer up comprehensive and interactive course materials for free, she explained, represents “an unprecedented act of transparency, revealing what really goes on in some of the world’s most prestigious universities in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
Walsh’s book also provides a brief history of the origins of these programs, which started in the midst of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s when “universities had a desire to carve out territory in the online space,” she said.
MIT’s 2002 OpenCourseWare initiative was one of the first programs to offer free content to the public. Several other universities followed suit with their own projects, including Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Open Yale Courses and webcast.berkeley.
These programs were not only nonprofit, but provided comprehensive programs which often offered videos of lectures, homework, exams, textbook readings and even interactive demonstrations by professors.
These initial programs have led to a rapid increase in the use of programs such as iTunes U, Walsh explains in her book, that offer more cost-effective, free educational content to the public.
Although it lacks most of the interactive qualities of some of the most innovative programs, iTunes U has become one of the most widely used ways for universities to provide basic educational content on the Internet. There are nearly 400,000 files currently available on the program, posted by over 800 universities across the globe.
Yet finding the right balance between the feasibility of broadening access to content and staying committed to educational priorities can be challenging, though Bowen said he is certain the advent of publicly accessible content is here to stay.
“It’s not going to be possible to put this genie back in the bottle,” he said. “The pressures to give students and others the access to education materials is only going to grow. I see no way of reversing that trend, not that I think it would be desirable to reverse it.”
And the move toward online content could soon turn to increasing access to lectures and class materials for the universities’ own students, not just the general public.
“The pressure on places like Princeton to allow its own students to do more and more through online methods will only be increased,” Bowen explained.
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