MIT's OpenCourseWare: almost ready for prime time: University debuts internal pilot of new system; worldwide launch in fall. (Update).

Students around the world will soon be able to find out what's behind an MIT education. Nearly a year after the school announced that it would make materials for all its courses freely available on the Web in a system called OpenCourseWare, the first phase of the project is set to debut.

The test phase of 20 OCW sites represents a fraction of the more than 2,000 courses that will be offered in coming years. Pilot courses ranging from linguistics, philosophy, biology, and physics, to speech communications, ocean engineering, and electrical engineering, will be online this spring.

The catch? "The initial course sites will be available only to the MIT community--namely, students and faculty," says Kyung Han, who, along with Laura Koller, is a project manager for the OCW transition. "MIT is definitely planning to launch OCW for the world this fall, as scheduled," Han told University Business. "Right now, however, we're still evolving OCW and using what we're learning from this small group of course sites, for broader distribution and usage."

The main purpose of the test launch, says Han, is to resolve formatting and consistency issues among the various course offerings. "Even at this early stage, we have come across interesting challenges in defining common terminology and standardization of course materials," says the project manager. One challenge lies in presenting courses that vary widely in content (i.e., text files, graphic images, special characters and symbols). "This diversity can be found in the file formats, but also can be seen across curricula, " says Ham "For instance, there are a number of special phonetic symbols that are required in speech communications and linguistics. Obviously, these symbols make the translation process even more difficult for those types of course materials. Moreover, engineering courses tend to have more laboratory-based courses and, therefore, online simulation data."

The project's Transition Team must also define the technical requirements of OCW's unique IT infrastructure, before it can go public. "Even with the number of IT offerings and products available on the market, right now I don't think there exists anything ideal for what we want for OCW," says Han. "This is very much a long-term challenge and could even result in different solutions for different user segments (such as internal-to-MIT, and rest-of-the-world). Our path forward is to define the best transition plan to help us move from the model we have now, to a new model that satisfies all the needs and requirements we have seen during the pilot phase."