MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), one of the landmark projects that helped spark the open education movement, marks the 10-year anniversary of the site’s launch today. On Oct. 1, 2003, the OCW site officially launched, sharing the core educational materials — including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams — from 500 MIT courses freely and openly on the Web under a license that permits flexible reuse. Since launch, the site has grown to include materials from more than 2,180 courses across all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate programs.
The site continues to be once of the most widely used educational resources on the Web, attracting more than 23 million visits in 2012 and an expected 27 million by the end of 2013. An estimated 170 million individuals worldwide have accessed OCW material since Oct. 1, 2003. Over the past ten years, the program has generated some dramatic usage numbers, including:

  • 10 billion server hits (files requested from OCW servers)
  • 870 million page views
  • 135 million visits to the main OCW site
  • 45 million visits to translations of OCW content
  • 43.5 million iTunes lecture video downloads
  • 48.6 million YouTube lecture video views, and
  • 18.5 million downloads of course content .zip files.

Professor Dick KP Yue, who chaired the committee that proposed OCW in the year 2000, described the impetus for the project. “In the digital age, Institutions like MIT have a responsibility — and an opportunity — to impact learners far beyond their campuses. OCW embodies MIT’s commitment to constantly widening access to knowledge.”  Read more.