Learning Without Limits: How OCW Opens Opportunity for Curious Minds Worldwide

Celebrate 25 years of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)—a bold experiment that became a global movement. This symposium brings together learners, educators, supporters, open knowledge leaders, and the MIT community to honor OCW’s extraordinary impact and to chart the future of open education.

Since its launch in 2001, OCW has empowered millions worldwide with free access to MIT course materials. This anniversary offers a moment to recognize the vibrant ecosystem that sustains open knowledge as a public good—and to reaffirm MIT’s mission-driven leadership in ensuring that high-quality learning remains accessible to all.

Join us for an engaging, dynamic, and celebratory program featuring MIT leadership, pioneering faculty, global learners, open education innovators, and philanthropic partners. Together, we will explore OCW’s legacy, its role in the evolving open ecosystem, and the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Who Should Attend
This gathering welcomes:

• Learners and educators worldwide who use OCW to teach, learn, and create new opportunities
• Philanthropic supporters and donors who power open education
• MIT faculty, students, and staff invested in sharing knowledge freely and openly
• Collaborators across the global open education and open knowledge ecosystems

For the complete program, please visit MIT Open Learning. [add event url]

11:15 AM–12:15 PM
Learning Without Limits: How OCW Opens Opportunity for Curious Minds Worldwide
A conversation with learners and educators whose stories reveal the transformative power of open knowledge—showing how OCW has sparked curiosity, expanded opportunity, and inspired people worldwide to imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

Speaker biographies

Andrea Henshall is a retired Air Force Special Operations Instructor Pilot and Research and Development Officer. She has a BS in Astronautical Engineering from the US Air Force Academy, an SM from MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics, an MS in Computer Science from Auburn University, and is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Andrea extensively used MIT’s OpenCourseWare to support her graduate degrees and her transition from the military back into academia. She attributes much of her success to the program.

Andrea also advocates for the use of MIT’s OpenCourseWare to those she mentors through her volunteer work. She serves as a member of the STEM Academic Advisory Committee for the Warrior Scholar Project and lectures at their virtual and in-person STEM bootcamps. She is an ambassador for Service to School, a Graduate Application Assistance Program (GAAP) mentor at MIT, and a frequent speaker at national student veteran conferences, guiding veterans and other underrepresented applicants through the process of applying to selective academic programs.

Dr. Victor Odumuyiwa holds a Doctorate (Ph.D.) from Lorraine University, France, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Lagos. He was an Empowering The Teacher (ETT) Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2013. His academic interests include responsible AI, Natural Language Processing, and human-centred computing, with research spanning ethical AI, sentiment analysis, recommender systems, education analytics, and public health informatics. He led the Machine Intelligence Research Group (MIRG) from 2022 to 2025, advancing context-aware AI research focused on addressing development challenges within African contexts. He also successfully organized and chaired the 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (ICAIR), one of Nigeria’s leading AI research conferences.

Beyond these, Dr. Odumuyiwa’s work attracts multidisciplinary and international collaboration, bringing together universities, policy organisations, and industry partners to address priority areas in AI, data governance, and innovation ecosystems. His leadership reflects a deep commitment to building Africa’s research capacity and enabling evidence-based technology deployment with societal impact.

He currently serves as Director of the NITDA IT Hub (NITHUB) at the University of Lagos, where he builds bridges between research, industry, and policy to accelerate technology adoption and innovation in Africa.

Elizabeth Siler is a professor at Worcester State University in the Business Administration and Economics Department. She teaches management classes to undergraduate students and almost exclusively uses open education resources. 

She recently co-authored a chapter about practices that can help faculty humanize our online teaching environments, in "Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online,” by Athabasca University Press, which is an open-source academic publisher. 

Dr. Siler’s research is on pregnancy loss, and she is currently conducting a project talking with people about their experiences of returning to work after a pregnancy ending. 

Her degrees are from Boston University, Simmons University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.


Hinata Yamahara is a high school senior from Duluth, Georgia. He was born in Los Angeles, but most of his childhood memories stem from yearly visits to Osaka, Japan. Growing up, he often wondered why Japanese cities looked so different compared to those in the US, frequently comparing their modern trains to the endless highways of Los Angeles and Atlanta. Discovering OpenCourseWare allowed him to explore the world of urban planning and design, opening his eyes to one of his greatest passions.

In addition to urban planning, Hinata is actively pursuing his pilot’s license. He is heavily involved in extracurriculars at his high school: he serves as the drum captain and center snare drummer for the marching band and leads the Environmental, Aviation, 21st Century Leaders, and Food2Kids clubs, as well as the Model UN team. Outside of school, Hinata enjoys hiking, exploring new cities and architecture, and solo traveling.

All sessions will be streamed live on the MIT OpenCourseWare YouTube Channel. They will be recorded and made available online after the event.

To see the complete program, please visit MIT Open Learning.