In addition to combing through this handy, all-in-one-place web site, Educational Pathways talked with Vijay Kumar, MIT’s assistant provost and director of academic computing, and Hal Abelson, professor of computer science and engineering and CET co-chair, to get a sense of some of the things happening in the world of educational technology at MIT.

When discussing online teaching and learning, the two initiatives that come to the forefront at MIT are the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) and the Open Courseware Initiative (OCW). If predictions are accurate, these two initiatives, whose identities are often misconstrued, could have a tremendous impact on online teaching and learning on an international scale in the near future.

According to the MITCET web site, OKI is "an open-source framework that supports the development of a variety of educational applications in an efficient manner, funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation." OCW is "a large-scale, Web-based initiative to provide free, worldwide access to educational materials for virtually all MIT courses," funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Both initiatives are in the second year of a two-year start-up phase. Institutions collaborating on OKI include Stanford, North Carolina State, Dartmouth, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Cambridge University, University of Wisconsin and the University of Washington. OCW has announced that 100 MIT courses will be made accessible to the world by the end of this month.

OKI and OCW are indirectly related to each other. "When OCW materials are delivered, they will be delivered on OKI-compliant platforms," says Kumar, who defines OKI as a two-pronged project to create open-source educational and infrastructure services. "What we are building is infrastructure for all kinds of educational applications, both instructional and administrative systems, because these services are common to each other."

Tied into the essence of open-source educational and infrastructure services are standards and specifications. "When it comes to standards and specifications, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel," says Kumar, adding that MIT is working "hand in glove" with the Instructional Management Systems Global Learning Consortium (IMS), which defines and delivers interoperable specifications for exchanging learning content. IMS membership includes vendors, government organizations and universities from around the world.

In terms of the actual implementation of OKI, Kumar explains how MIT, Stanford and the University of Michigan, for example, have adapted their learning management systems (LMS) to the OKI open-source architecture. "So you can see that there will be many tools that belong to various learning management systems available in the open source," eventually enabling institutions to pick and choose what they might want to utilize, says Kumar. "For example, an institution might like the assessment engine from Stanford, and the content management tool from MIT, or the discussion tool from Michigan."

Fulfilling this pick-and-choose scenario essentially entails the creation of "a business process that enables people to have free access," says Kumar.

"What’s important is not just to develop the technology; it’s to develop the processes," (that allow institutions to share and use it), says Hal Abelson, a world-recognized MIT professor who is heavily involved in another major MIT initiative called iCampus, the MIT-Microsoft Alliance, which is a 5-year, $25 million program started in October 1999 "to explore educational transformation through technology."

"It is not that there is some magic technology. It is what are you going to do with it?" Abelson asks.

One thing that MIT will do, in particular, as it pertains to OKI, is package the infrastructure service end in what they are calling "OKI in a Box," says Kumar. For example, a small institution might not have the technology, infrastructure or staff to build a sophisticated IT foundation, so "we are packaging a set of infrastructure pieces so that people can take advantage of these tools without big investments on their part."

At the same time, Kumar cautions that nothing is really for free. "One of the things you have to think about is providing support and some infrastructure building on your end." However, he does claim that OKI users should be able to lower their infrastructure maintenance and building costs because OKI is a sustainable product that was built around the understanding that technology inevitably changes over time. Hence, OKI will more easily and smoothly allow institutions to customize their infrastructure to accommodate new technological innovations.

"We are building the infrastructure for sustainable educational transformation is the way I look at it," says Kumar. Nonetheless, he adds that this notion of sustainability is both a "great opportunity and a great challenge.

"I think of it as having three legs," he continues, "the technology substrate, the organization substrate and the policy substrate. You have to build in all these things.

"The challenge is to promote innovation, but at the same time have a view of the fact that you have to build infrastructure so that it can be sustainable. If you lead with infrastructure, innovation gets thwarted. But you can’t not look at infrastructure; that is sort of the dance we are in."