Interview with Anne Margulies, executive director of MIT Open Course Ware(2)
Xing Zong: I guess users of OCW have a wide spectrum. For example, motivated high school students, college students, working adults. They must have different goals when use MIT OCW, my question is, how do you cater to all these readers?
Margulies: We’re still learning how people use the materials, but yes, so far we have identified different groups of users each with their own approaches to the materials. Our users are divided up between self-learners (50%), students (32%) and educators (17%). Where our evaluation reveals changes we can make to the site that benefit user populations, we make those changes, but our focus is on providing the maximum benefit to the widest possible audience. We do pay particular attention to educators, because their use of the site often brings our materials to students who do not visit the site directly.
Xing Zong: I browsed the OCW webpage and found most of the course materials in text file. In this multimedia internet world, do you think there will be more videos? Say something like Youtube can facilitate teaching? Besides videos, what other technology innovation will OCW adopt?
Margulies: Our core mission is to publish the course materials our faculty produce, and we will continue to focus on those materials. Where opportunities arise, we will include more video, animations and simulations, but overall, our users have always indicated that static materials such as lecture notes are the most valuable types of content.
Xing Zong: The popularity of the courses must vary. For example, a finance course may attract more attention, therefore accumulates more hits than say, a biology course. Does MIT OCW rate the popularity of the courses?
Margulies: We do track traffic to courses, and not surprisingly, the most popular are core undergraduate courses in fields for which MIT is well-known: Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Physics, Biology, and Economics. By design many of these courses include video as well, which makes them even more popular.
Xing Zong: How does MIT OCW interact with the readers? If readers find some mistakes or have some suggestions to improve the course, do they have a good channel? Right now wikipedia conception is very popular, do you think MIT OCW might adopt this method so that readers can freely add their comments and correct mistakes?
Margulies: Currently we have a feedback e-mail link through which users can ask questions and provide feedback. We answer about 600 e-mails a month through this service. We’ve also had discussion boards on about 400 of the courses on the site but they have not been well-used. Right now we are working through the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org) to develop interactive user support systems that help not just our visitors but also visitors to other OpenCourseWare sites as well.
Xing Zong: What do you think another institution; say a Chinese university will benefit from MIT OCW?
Margulies: Chinese universities can benefit from our site by studying how MIT approaches teaching particular topics and by finding useful materials published on our site. Likewise, MIT can benefit from seeing how institutions in China and elsewhere approach subjects, and can use materials openly shared by other schools.
Xing Zong: While many people applaud the steps taken by MIT, many others have mixed feelings. They either don’t like the idea or worry this might discourage the people who pay the tuition or devalue an MIT degree. What is your comment on that?
Margulies: We’ve heard just the opposite from many in the MIT community, that OCW highlights the importance of the residential experience at MIT, the opportunity to study with leading professors and students in an intensive and highly collaborative environment. This is not something we could replicate on the Web.
