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OCW currently receives upwards of 1.5 million visits each month from 900,000 unique individuals (2). Students have grown to 42% of the audience, and educators and independent learners now constitute 9% and 43% of visitors, respectively (3). Twelve percent of educators responding to a March 2010 visitor survey indicated that they do incorporate OCW materials into their own content as anticipated, but educators more frequently use OCW for personal learning (37%), to adopt new teaching methods (18%), and as a reference for their students (16%). Students were largely expected to use the site as a supplement to materials they received in their own classes, a use identified by 40% of students. Just over 43%, however, indicated that they also use OCW for personal learning beyond the scope of their formal studies, and a further 12% use it as an aid in planning their course of study. Independent learners use OCW in a variety of personal (41%) and professional (50%) contexts, including home-schooling children and keeping up on developments in their professional field. Sixty-six percent of visitors indicate they are mostly or completely successful at meeting their educational goals for visiting the site.

Perhaps more significant than the direct impact of the site is the global OCW movement MIT helped launch. More than 200 universities worldwide have joined MIT in sharing their own educational materials openly, creating a global body of knowledge that spans many cultures and academic levels. More than 13,000 courses from these schools are available through the OpenCourseWare Consortium portal (http://ocwconsortium.org) (4).

No, it’s not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte — instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

The Illinois Institute of Technology has even more ambitious plans to integrate iPads into academics. A technology initiative will give all incoming freshman undergraduates—about 550 students—an iPad to use as a technological enhancement to the curriculum. Because all freshman are required to take several introductory courses, such as “Introduction to the Professions,” software, e-texts, and other resources will be uniform for those courses.

• Seton Hill University’s “An iPad for Everyone” is part of the university’s Griffin Technology Advantage Program. Announced just as the first iPads were beginning to ship, the program will put an iPad in the hands of every full-time student starting this fall.
• Students at George Fox University, which has given a MacBook to incoming freshman for several years, will now offer students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad. “With this, we’re basically asking students ‘What computing system will work best for you?’” the university’s chief information officer, Grag Smith, said at the time the program was announced.
• North Carolina State University Libraries announced this past spring that it acquired 30 iPads to offer students and faculty for four-hour loans as part of the school’s Technology Lending Service. That service offers a variety of devices for loan to students, including laptops, digital cameras, eBook readers, graphing calculators, and more. In addition to browsing the web and “evaluating whether this latest platform is something you want to invest in for the future,” the iPads can be used to read some of the 9,000 eBooks NC State recently acquired.