What major American university has inaugurated a 10 year, $100 million program to put most of its course materials on the internet for free?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is the pioneering American university that embarked on a groundbreaking initiative to make a vast array of its course materials freely available online. This ambitious undertaking, known as MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), was publicly announced in April 2001, with the goal of providing open access to virtually all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate-level course content to anyone in the world. The project was designed to advance knowledge and educate students globally, embodying MIT's commitment to the "shared intellectual commons" in academia.

MIT OpenCourseWare quickly became a cornerstone of the institution's dedication to openly sharing educational resources. The initiative was initially supported by significant funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Review), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT itself, highlighting the substantial investment made to bring this vision to fruition. By November 2007, MIT had published nearly its entire curriculum online, encompassing over 1,800 courses across 33 academic disciplines.

The scope of MIT OpenCourseWare is extensive, offering materials such as lecture notes, homework problems, exams (often with solutions), and even complete video lectures for many courses. This monumental effort has had a profound impact, inspiring numerous other educational institutions to develop their own open educational resources. MIT's commitment to this program has made world-class education accessible to millions of learners, allowing individuals to study at their own pace and explore a diverse range of subjects from computer science and engineering to humanities and economics, without any registration requirements.