Over the last decade, several elite academic institutions — most notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — have leveraged new technology to make course materials widely available online at no cost to the public. While some Stanford students have vocally supported this burgeoning “freedom of education” movement, the University has yet to mirror MIT’s approach. This may soon change.

Stanford computer science student Klaus Ganser ‘09 developed a basic prototype of Stanford OpenCourseWare (OCW) last spring. The program would make current offerings on Coursework and the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) publicly accessible through a centralized Web site.

The proposed site would follow a non-profit model, with all materials — video, audio and print — available for free. Course materials would be distributed as protected intellectual property under a Creative Commons license. Such licenses are less stringent than standard copyright protection, minimizing certain legal restrictions and expanding accessibility.

Ganser recommended a license that would make course content free to share and adapt, but only for non-commercial purposes and only if it were attributed to its source.

Ganser’s prototype is modeled after MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, which makes syllabi, lecture notes and a growing collection of video lectures from over 1,800 courses freely available online.

MIT’s site, originally designed to share innovative teaching methods with fellow educators, now receives over 1.5 million hits a month. While approximately half of visitors are educators or students, the other half are self-learners with no university affiliation.

Within the past several years, fourteen American schools have joined the OpenCourseWare consortium, including John Hopkins, Notre Dame and Tufts. In the past two months, Harvard has moved to publish all of its faculty research for free online, while UC-Berkeley has launched webcast.berkeley.edu, offering podcasts of 50 of its courses.

Stanford currently offers a little over a dozen full-length audio courses for free download through “iTunes U,” a branch of Apple’s popular downloading service that hosts digital content from colleges and universities. A Stanford YouTube channel distributing select video content will launch in the coming months.

While these offerings are limited, the University has convened a task force, the Stanford Open Education Initiative (SOEI), to explore the possibility of significantly expanding content and accessibility in the near future.

“[SOEI has been] researching the range of options,” said Scott Stocker, director of Stanford Web Communications, including “joining the OpenCourseWare Consortium, building a site similar to the Yale Open Courses site, or attempting to create a unique Stanford offering.”

At stake in this effort are issues both of intellectual property right and of prestige. Some critics believe the OpenCourseWare movement will undercut the value of university degrees and lead to pervasive intellectual plagiarism. Accessibility, they warn, may come at a steep price.

Supporters counter that accessibility will promote collaboration between academics and advance democratic ends. They argue that sharing university resources is not the same, or even similar, to handing out credentials.

These arguments are complicated by the prickly legal issues that surround copyright protection and infringement, and the growing question of how to license intellectual property in a digital age.

All course content currently available through Coursework and SCPD is protected under copyright law and the TEACH Act, which extends fair use rights to students in a digital classroom. The SCPD, an adjunct to the School of Engineering, offers over 250 videotaped courses online, but at a cost of more than $1,200 per unit. Coursework, which features course materials for hundreds of Stanford classes, is accessible only to enrolled Stanford students and faculty.

While Coursework administrators had no comment on expansion plans, a spokesman for SCPD said that the center has no immediate plans to offer anything on par with MIT. Paul Marca, SCPD’s long-time deputy director, said the center has not yet developed a revenue model to support the kind of long-term investment OCW would require, though he hopes to offer open content on a smaller scale in the future.

Lindell Lucy ‘06, a strong supporter of the OpenCourseWare movement, dismissed Marca’s comments, saying SCPD’s interests have been “heavily influenced by money.”

Lucy began publicly championing the freedom of education movement last year, petitioning President John Hennessy and others in the administration to make Stanford’s “world-class education” freely available to the public online. After months of letter-writing, he brought his case to Facebook, authoring a series of provocative notes on the issue that drew dozens of comments from supporters.

While Lucy has outlined a plan for filming and distributing lectures with an eye toward minimizing costs, a number of legal issues remain for the University.

The costs of packaging, housing and distributing online content aside, the University would also be faced with securing copyright releases for all materials faculty might use in the classroom — a time intensive and costly effort.

Marca estimated that at one point MIT had twenty staff members employed full-time securing releases, one of the reasons, he said, that MIT has since “largely abandoned” online video. By MIT estimates, he said, OCW has a sticker price of $20,000 per course, much of that coming from the university’s budget and endowment.

“How much money do we have to make and on what margin to recover that cost?” Marca asked.

Marca said that if the University were to develop OpenCourseWare along the lines of MIT, it should look to develop a program that is both high in quality and self-sustaining. To develop such a model, he said, Stanford would need to find a productive way to manage these copyright issues, either by challenging faculty to develop and make available their own materials or by hiring staffers to edit publicly distributable content.

These suggestions may prove useful to SOEI as the advisory council prepares its recommendations for the future of OpenCourseWare at Stanford. While Stocker said that “no decisions have been made yet,” SOEI will be making a formal proposal to Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D. ‘82 this summer.