ABSTRACT
What opportunities does the digital university offer, as seen by today’s universities, and what are the implications of information technology for education? The university with the longest tradition in this area is MIT, which has been running so-called OpenCourseWare online since 2002. The project started under the leadership of Robert Brown, the then provost of MIT; officially, the project was motivated by a desire to encourage international cooperation by means of distance learning. Behind this, however, lay the idea of the shared intellectual commons, offering knowledge in the global commons in a way comparable to shared use of the ‘commons’, the common land, in the Middle Ages. Based on this mix of commercial interests and idealism, MIT has put large amounts of open course material on the Internet since 2002, and this has proved a hit. At present, 2,260 courses are available, and the site has had 175 million visitors to date! 1 Few institutions have benefited so greatly from making a generous gesture: worldwide brand awareness has risen enormously and societal support for the university has risen even further.
