My first thought was "Wow! Is MIT really in need of this money?" If not are they're just probing the public opinion on double selling already on hand material.
For anyone who hasn't worked in academia there are three big funding sources for a university:
1. Endowments: Someone donates you money, you put it into a saving/investment portfolio, and you spend the interest of it. It's continual/perpetual funding for whatever you want.
2. Overhead on grants: I'd bet more then half of MIT's money is taxpayer-funded. MIT has a 54.70% overhead which means that of any grant that anyone on campus gets only 45.3% goes to real research. (I will say that a 54.7% overhead is pretty average. My school has a ~60% overhead.)
3. Last and least, Students: MIT's admission costs are $41,547. That's $187,460,064 total in from their current undergraduate class. They're still making money from grad students but it won't be the same amount so I didn't add them into them mix. You also need to remember for every dollar they take in from someone, they'll find at least 2 dollars to take in from someone else. When you go to a college and pay their admission free, you're paying the subsidized version and the college is getting rich.
My sentiment exactly. I tried leaving this comment the other day on another OCW-related post, but didn't have the patience to put together numbers like this. MIT is a cash monster that like all schools of its caliber at this point exists basically only to perpetuate itself. This institution sued Aaron Schwartz so hard and so relentlessly just to make the point that open knowledge is not their business. Giving them money is truly a waste of money when you can give that money where it might have some impact.
You catch my thoughts here. I'm torn between "This is a great resource, we should pay for it" and "Does MIT really need any more money?"
This does seem to just be one aspect of their annual fundraising. Donors like to see their money go to specific targets, and this happens to be a feel-good one.
My opinion is, if you are an American tax payer, that you already have been paying for this. If you pay your taxes you pay for the NSF/DARPA/IARPA programs.
Really? You know NSF/DARPA/IARPA aslo fund private companies like Boeing and Lockheed. Are you saying you shouldn't have to pay for flights either because you pay taxes?
Just to clarify, because there is a lot of misinformation about overhead considering the Trump administration wants to cut it. 55% overhead means for every $1, another 0.55 gets routed to MIT (so about a 1/3 goes to overhead). Also, the overhead goes to real research. For example, my lab doesn't pay an electricity bill, or a heating/cooling bill, or a cleaning bill, or rent, etc. Also, you can get more exact numbers on MIT here [1].
What you are saying is true but I have two issues with it.
1) Most universities get federal funding for facilities. That's what the student's tuition and taxes are meant to pay for. Now I agree that won't make up the difference (right now I've got ~300 machines running my code on my school's super computer) but that means more then half of the money for the research doesn't go directly to the research. Your grant for curing kittens of sadness also has to fund the super top secret nerve gas researchers work down the hall.
2) Many universities require you to pay for utilities, working space, and other things and still take overhead! I know a few who I don't want to point out an laugh at directly but we all know unfortunate colleagues who work at these universities (a few of which are publicly funded).
We, as researchers, shouldn't be so dismissive of the blatant pocket-lining that universities do just because maybe a quarter of it will go back to helping us.
Overhead basically makes it extremely difficult to start research in "convincing and novel" aspects of research when few people (maybe under 50 in the world) understand that what you're doing has value. In R&D that's most of the things that people are working on. If you're not fortunate enough to have someone already established take you under your wing your great idea will never see the light of day.
1. I don't know where you are getting this but this is wrong. First of all tuition doesn't pay anywhere close to even breaking even at this point much less investment. Second MIT is a private university so I don't know where you are getting tax thing. Where do you get more than half of funding doesn't go directly to my research? I think you are misunderstanding overhead rates. For example, a 50% overhead rate means to spend a million dollars for my lab, I need to raise 1.5M.
2. Most universities that do that don't require you to pay for space, but will base the amount of space you have on grant dollars you bring in. None that I know of make you pay for electricity, gas, cleaning, grant admin, compliance, bookkeeping, etc.
3. How does overhead make it difficult to do convincing and novel research? In fact overhead helps it in my opinion. This idea that getting rid of overhead will somehow make anything better or have better value for the money is seriously misguided.
I have mixed opinions about OCW but overall I think it is an invaluable resource. I am presently working through MIT 20.219 Writing and Hosting the Educational Show (2016, Choe, E.) and 18.006 Calculus Revisited (2010, Gross, H.). The calc classes are from 1970 so I wondered why they were there. After watching 3 lectures straight until 0600 and laughing through it, I saw why. I've also done Harvard CS50x, and many others from various sources. Some classes are more to sell the school to potential students than to share knowledge but MIT stays away from that. Self-learning is tricky for some but I think learning how to learn is as critical as the course content. My learning has accelerated greatly since studying teaching adult learners and graduate students. You are your own teacher in a way and must take responsibility for your own learning outcomes. Politics drive education, many factors influence the level of commitment from MIT to the OCW program and learners, but I don't believe that should change the value of the content and if public funding will keep it online, I support it. I owe them so much for what I've learned from the MIT culture, its amazing faculty, and the students who help shape the learning environment. I get called to consult and develop for some of the biggest companies in the world now and I can be confident in the quality of my work and what I teach others :) I call that value.
Prof Gross is an awesome teacher. The lecture series include a lot of prerequisite material form high school math so would be great for someone to get started with math.
Am I the only one that finds OCW conpletely underwhelming?
Lecture slides and notes which make up a lot of the content isn't very useful to me without the lectures.
Stanford has a few classes with all the lectures on YouTube. During my first algorithms course in undergrad they were super useful and the professors were really good at explaining things in plain languages. Better than my own instructors.
Same thing for Khan Academy. Their content is brilliant.
It's a bit of a mix. There is video and audio for some classes. The other material ranges in how detailed it is.
When OCW was originally introduced, it wasn't really intended as a "MOOC," as the term is used today. It was more intended as source material for other teachers to put together classes following the curriculum developed by MIT than as something that students would use directly.
This original purpose didn't really pan out and the material for some classes has morphed accordingly but it means that you have a fair bit of variety in the posted materials.
ADDED: If you want turnkey classes, MIT also has a fair bit of material on edX which it co-founded.
I think calling OCW just a data dump is a little bit too over the top.
I am following their Linear Algebra course ( https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algeb... ) and so far it's been really great. There are questions and answers after each lesson, you even get exams and their answers so you can test your progress.
Also the youtube comments for some of these classes seems to suggest that a lot of people are really thankful for the content.
There was very little video and audio when it was started. Remember it dates to 2002 (i.e. three years before YouTube was founded) and it wasn't really routine, easy, or inexpensive to take video of lectures, edit it, and host it online.
Also, as I said in another comment, the main impetus of OCW was to provide materials for educators to use in order to create their own courses. In a way, I suppose it was part of a similar top-down, enable institutions to provide local learning opportunities thinking that One Laptop Per Child was part of as well.
A comment on the comments about MIT's role as a school, government "subsidies" etc: Don't think of MIT as a school, think of it as a very large research lab with a small school attached.
There are about 10K students, but about 20K staff, a surprising number of which don't even interact with grad students much less undergrads (and undergrads are often found in research labs to a much greater degree than other schools).
So if you quote the stats, consider that tuition (and residence fees etc) is only about 14% of revenue. Does that mean the education is subsidized by the other 86%? No, education (which includes operating the dorms etc) is only about 16% of expenses (this has fluctuated but hasn't changed hugely over the 30 years since I graduated, not that I monitor the budget every year!).
So there's a reason why you feel like students aren't appreciated t MIT -- by many people they aren't. OCW is not just a great resource, but a way of making the educational mission more visible (and to the administration visibility is primarily how much money you bring in -- which I consider reasonable, as long as it's not the only metric).
I get several hardcopy pieces of MIT propaganda per month; less than half of it mentions students, almost none of whom are undergrads. And this is despite the fact that my donations and participation are almost all in support of undergraduate education.
I don't necessarily disagree with some of your points. But MIT has about 12K staff (of which about 2K are faculty or teaching staff). And I believe that the remaining 10K includes Lincoln Labs which has about 4K employees.
FWIW there's Lincoln Labs, MITRE, Draper and other such fig leaf spinouts designed to get paper over MIT's Vietnam-war-era restrictions on classified research.
For anyone who hasn't worked in academia there are three big funding sources for a university:
1. Endowments: Someone donates you money, you put it into a saving/investment portfolio, and you spend the interest of it. It's continual/perpetual funding for whatever you want.
2. Overhead on grants: I'd bet more then half of MIT's money is taxpayer-funded. MIT has a 54.70% overhead which means that of any grant that anyone on campus gets only 45.3% goes to real research. (I will say that a 54.7% overhead is pretty average. My school has a ~60% overhead.)
3. Last and least, Students: MIT's admission costs are $41,547. That's $187,460,064 total in from their current undergraduate class. They're still making money from grad students but it won't be the same amount so I didn't add them into them mix. You also need to remember for every dollar they take in from someone, they'll find at least 2 dollars to take in from someone else. When you go to a college and pay their admission free, you're paying the subsidized version and the college is getting rich.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Tec...