MIT OpenCourseWare may have been the first initiative to offer free and open access to text- and video-format educational materials from across a university’s entire curriculum, but ours is by no means the only program of its sort. In the decade after MIT OpenCourseWare was launched, similar efforts sprang up at institutions worldwide, some of them even incorporating “OpenCourseWare” or “OCW” into their name.* One of the most successful of those programs, UTokyo OCW, was founded in 2006 and is thus celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

Offering approximately 1,900 educational materials from courses taught at the University of Tokyo, including lecture notes and videos, UTokyo OCW resembles MIT OpenCourseWare in many ways. Like MIT OpenCourseware, UTokyo OCW has updated its platform over the years to adapt to technological developments, optimizing its website for use on mobile phones and tablets and incorporating video playlists for a more user-friendly viewing experience. And like MIT OpenCourseWare, UTokyo OCW’s materials are made available under a Creative Commons license to allow free republication—though the terms of their CC BY-NC-ND license differ slightly from those of our CC BY-NC-SA one.

More broadly, UTokyo OCW has also taken an expansive view of its educational mission, working to support the needs of various kinds of users. As described in UTokyo’s general description of the program, UTokyo OCW exists to “support a wide range of knowledge exploration initiatives, including promoting inquiry-based learning and assisting high school students with career choices, nurturing the intellectual curiosity of lifelong learners, and helping educators create teaching materials.” The breadth of this vision is one that we at MIT OpenCourseWare share wholeheartedly.

It’s also evident that like MIT OpenCourseWare, UTokyo OCW has been continuously re-evaluating its role in the open education ecosystem as a whole. The announcement of the organization’s 20th anniversary celebration notes that “We now live in an era in which knowledge is disseminated by a variety of entities, not just universities. In light of these changing circumstances, universities are being asked what kind of learning they can share with society through open education. Furthermore, today, open education is not just about providing knowledge unilaterally; it is about learners, citizens, companies, and educational institutions collaborating and co-creating across boundaries, which is both a new challenge and a new possibility.” (machine translation of the Japanese original)

The kinship in spirit between UTokyo OCW and MIT OpenCourseWare is no coincidence. Not only was the Japanese OCW modeled in part on the MIT one, but both programs are deeply indebted to the work and vision of Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa, who has been a formative influence on open education for decades, having served on the MIT committee that originally proposed the creation of OpenCourseWare. Later, he was the chair of MIT OpenCourseWare’s faculty advisory committee (2010–2013) and served as MIT’s senior associate dean for open learning (2018–2021). Between those stints, he was also project professor and director of online education at the University of Tokyo (2013–2018). So it’s entirely fitting that the University of Tokyo has invited Prof. Miyagawa to deliver a keynote address at UTokyo OCW’s 20th anniversary celebration later this month.

We at MIT OpenCourseWare would like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt congratulations and appreciation to UTokyo OCW, and our heartfelt thanks to Prof. Miyagawa for his dedication in advancing open education around the world!

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*Many of these institutions are now participants in the Open Education Global (OEGlobal) consortium, whose 2026 hybrid in-person/online conference MIT Open Learning will be co-hosting this October. Stay tuned for further discussion of that conference in an upcoming post!

(Header image: photo of Tokyo courtesy of marc emer on Flickr. License: CC BY.)