Business Education Is Free With OpenCourseWare

Considering a career in business? Browse your options

Do you really need that business degree? Or could you make due with the knowledge alone? If you’re a self-motivated learner, OpenCourseWare lets you get quite a business education using nothing more than a good library and a computer.

OpenCourseWare is free and open online publication of high quality educational materials offered by some of the top universities in the world. Many high ranking schools are putting entire courses online. You can easily download syllabi, reading lists, labs, assignment, and exams online. Streaming video lectures are even available for some courses.

It’s all free for the taking. No pesky registration or prerequisites required.

Why Give Education Away?
OpenCourseWare is the new model top tier schools are using to disseminate knowledge among scholars worldwide. The practice of making full courses available to everyone promotes collaboration and contributes to the idea of shared intellectual commons in academia. Open license publishing encourages reuse, redistribution and modification for non-commercial purposes.

One of the original committee members, Associate Dean of Engineering Dick Yue, had this to say,

“The idea is simple…just to publish our teaching material, our course content online and make it widely available to everyone who can use it, for free. The dream was that OpenCourseWare would be a broad-based movement that would impact knowledge, information and education worldwide. I think it’s coming to fruition even as we speak.”

What’s In It For Me?
While OCW does not grant degrees or certificates, doesn’t’ provide access to faculty, and probably doesn’t emcompass the entire content of a course, you can’t deny that an ambitious student could supplement traditional education significantly. (Or at least impress the boss.)

Say you’re sitting in a meeting where people are tossing out the phrase supply chain management. You keep your mouth shut until you can get home and search the OpenCourseWare Consortium database. Then you download the lecture notes and show up the next day as the resident expert on supply chain management. Knowledge is power.

The Consortium
The OpenCourseWare Consortium brings together more than 160 higher education institutions to create a comprehensive body of open educational content. Participating contributors use a shared model to present the information. OpenCourseWare Consortium’s mission is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

They seek to accomplish this by encouraging institutions worldwide to adopt the model of OpenCourseWare. They foster the development of new projects, as well as continue to improve delivery of the materials and reduce costs.

OCW contributors from all over the world have published an estimated 5,000 courses. Leading universities from the United States, China, Japan, Spain, Africa, Australia, Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia all publish OCW.

OpenCourseWare Expands
In November of 2007, MIT celebrated the accomplishment of having published 1800 virtual courses. Ninety percent of MIT faculty, many from the Sloan School of Management voluntarily contribute courses to the initiative.

OpenCourseWare began in 2001 at MIT as a 50-course pilot project. Now the site that includes nearly the complete undergraduate and graduate curriculum. MIT estimates that 35 million individuals have accessed OCW materials to date. Of those, 60 percent reside outside the United States. Courses have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Thai.