When MIT made a formal decision in the year 2000 to publish their course materials on the Internet, MIT alumni could have been miffed. Here was the institution’s renowned curriculum—previously accessible to students who paid for it with their tuition and hard-won academic achievement—being offered to anyone with a computer.

The executive director of the MIT OpenCourseWare program that manages publication of the curriculum, who herself is an alumna of MIT and the daughter of two more MIT graduates, says she and her former classmates were thrilled.

“We were really, really proud of MIT for doing this,” Cecilia d’Oliveira says. “Basically, we were leveraging what MIT does and making it more available to more people.”

Today, the biggest donors to the OpenCourseWare Web site are MIT alumni, and the average number of visitors each month is more than 1.5 million.

Because of its enormous success as a science and engineering education tool, MIT OpenCourseWare has been selected to receive the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, or SPORE. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

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