John Dehlin

A few of you have inquired lately as to my job situation, so I thought I’d let ya’ll know all at once. Here’s the scoop:

• In 1999, MIT Provost Robert A. Brown asked a committee of MIT faculty, students, and administrators to provide strategic guidance on how MIT should position itself in the distance/e-learning environment. The idea that emerged was called “OpenCourseWare” — which was quite revolutionary at the time (and remains so today). Instead of trying to make $$$ off of the Internet, MIT decided to openly and freely share its course materials with the world (via the Internet) — to help improve education worldwide. The result was MIT OpenCourseWare — where today you can find the course materials for over 1600 MIT courses freely available to all. Some are even available in video and audio format.
• It should be noted that 2 foundations (staffed by incredibly competent and visionary folk) stepped forward to fund/enable this endeavor (to the tune of tens of millions of $$$). Specifically:
  • The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
  • The Mellon Foundation
• Well, neither these foundations, nor MIT intended OCW to be a single-university thing. Instead, they hoped that just like with open source software, OpenCourseWare would spread as a movement, and become prevalent worldwide as one important approach to enabling global education. Consequently, Hewlett decided to expand the OCW program by funding OCWs at other institutions, including Tufts, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Utah State University (which is how I got involved in all this, thanks to Dr. David Wiley), Open University UK, UC Irvine, and several other universities worldwide.

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