Core Principles and Perspective – An Inside Look at Collaborations at MIT OpenCourseWare
By Shira Segal, Senior Manager of Open Education Collaborations, MIT Open Learning
Note: This is the first article in a three-part series that tells the story of what happens when MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, collaborates with Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona and College of the Canyons in California in order to put free and open educational resources into the hands of community college faculty. In this project, generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we worked closely with 11 faculty members over the course of a year to help them find and adapt MIT OpenCourseWare materials for use in their curriculum. In doing so, we created a community of practice and learned the value of working together, the power of listening, and the impact of Open on student success. Read the series: Collaborating with Community Colleges to Amplify the Power of Open, Collaborations Across Higher Education Sectors, and Key Learnings from Collaborations. This series accompanies a special Chalk Radio® episode.
What does it mean to advance open education initiatives through relationship building and strategic collaborations at MIT and beyond? My work at MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, entails being fully immersed in the open ecosystem, listening to the needs of the open education community at large, and actively supporting those working in this space. Our goal is to democratize knowledge by making high-quality educational materials accessible to everyone, anywhere in the world, for free. For us, being open is about providing free and open access to information that learners can use to transform their lives and the lives of those in their communities.
What this looks like on a daily basis for our Collaborations program can be wide-ranging. In my position as senior manager of open education collaborations, I provide open educational resource guidance and curation from the free and open materials available on OpenCourseWare and other open and free online repositories. By doing these things, I contribute to our team’s ability to continually respond to the rapidly changing landscape of education and emergent technologies, and then build communities of practice surrounding that technology. Whether I’m attending—or planning!—an educational conference, or working with nonprofit foundations to secure the resources that will enable the work of Open to happen, my goal in this work is to find new ways of listening to and learning from the open education community, and to work together in ways that are beneficial for learners around the world.
One question our team is always asking is how we can show up for those in the open education community and more broadly for those in higher education and adjacent fields. In light of MIT’s 25-year history of publishing free and open resources online, we want to know what we could be doing even better, and what we still need to learn. It’s a privilege and an honor that it’s my job to try to find the answers to these questions and to imagine with others what our shared, collective future can look like—and what it might take to create that future together.
Diving Deeper: What Makes Open Possible, and Its Value
It would be difficult not to be excited by OpenCourseWare’s rich archive of teaching materials that span the entire MIT curriculum. This past year alone we added 54 new course publications (including nearly 280 new lecture videos!) and 10 new Instructor Insights interviews to the 2,500+ publications already on the site. Our YouTube channel exceeds 6 million subscribers, and in 2025 the videos on our channel had over 44 million views. And this is in addition to our website, where we logged 21 million unique sessions for over 11 million users—all of whom can freely access the material without registration or log-in requirements.
All of this happens because of a small but mighty team of digital publication specialists, intellectual property coordinators, accessibility specialists, and a dedicated video team that supports these efforts. It takes an impressive amount of detailed, labor-intensive, and skilled effort to create a single course publication on our website, and our team continues to accomplish dozens of publications with the care that each one requires. For every resource we publish, there is a course author and MIT faculty members or instructors to thank for sharing.
Knowing this makes me appreciate the often invisible labor and idealistic commitment of all open education practitioners, from faculty, librarians, and instructional designers to those who work on open publishing platforms and open access repositories. The work of Open is not free, even as we make material that’s free and open for anyone to reuse and remix. And the ways in which open education intersects with other areas of open culture have been revelatory for me: from open science to open source, I now see open education as just one element among many.
And I can’t help but note there are so many elements that determine how we relate to one another both in and out of the classroom. As a former faculty member in the humanities, this interconnectedness of elements that makes up the fabric of our everyday experiences and determines the possibilities of our lives is something that continues to occupy me. My background in film studies and cultural memory has primed me to examine how the arts help us conceptualize, understand, and express who we are both individually and collectively. When in the classroom, I focused my efforts not only on the content of what we were learning but also on the contexts of that material and on the relationships they reflected, reinforced, and sparked.
The principles of open education and open pedagogy resonate with the ways I approached my teaching, although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. In order to increase students’ ways of relating not just to the material itself but to one another, too, I was committed to meeting students where they were. What this looked like took different forms: implementing flexible deadlines, co-creating assignments or the syllabus, and creating opportunities for peer mentorship and nondisposable assignments, not to mention decreasing textbook costs.
I came to MIT OpenCourseWare because of its legacy and also because of its utmost optimism in the power of sharing. I thrive knowing that we’re constantly striving to fulfill the ideals of what Open is and can be. And I’m eager to find new pathways for expanding Open and its impact.
Keep reading in Collaborations Across Higher Education Sectors.
(Header image credit: Photo by MIT OpenCourseWare.)
