| Date | Speakers | Talk |
| Mar 1, 2005 | Dr. M.S. Vijay Kumar, Assistant Provost and Director of Academic Computing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jeff Merriman, Senior Strategist, Academic Computing and Project Leader O.K.I, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
"Open Educational Opportunity" |
Since MIT's bold announcement of the Open CourseWare initiative in 2001, the content of about 1000 of its courses have been published on the Web and made available for free to the world. Alongside, other innovative projects such as iLabs from MIT's iCampus initiative and Narravision for visualizing cultures, are making educational resources and tools available to advance first-hand and experience-based education across disciplines.
Important infrastructure initiatives have also been launched recently with a view to enabling the sustainable implementation of these educational programs, through strengthening organizational capacity as well as through building open, standards based technology. A notable example is the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I). This MIT-led collaborative project is delivering an open architecture to support the development of portable and sustainable applications that can be easily integrated into existing infrastructure.
Each of these initiatives point to a rich palette of transformational possibilities for education. Together with the growing open source movement, they offer glimpses of a sustainable ecology of substantial and quality educational resources.
This presentation will highlight some of the educational opportunity presented by MIT.s current IT-enabled educational agenda and related initiatives, along with their strategic underpinnings and implications. It will address various dimensions of their impact on the form and function of education.
It will examine how these ambitious programs can achieve a vision characterized by an abundance of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities, not merely pervasive technology.