Knowledge Without Walls: MIT’s Ethos of Open

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]

1:00–1:45 PM
Knowledge Without Walls: MIT’s Ethos of Open
A cross-campus look at MIT’s leadership in all forms of open knowledge—expanding the open education legacy of OCW and championing knowledge as a public good. This session highlights how practices in open source technologies, open access, open science and data, and open publishing have evolved across MIT and influenced global movements for accessible and equitable learning.

Speaker biographies

Amy Brand is director and publisher of the MIT Press, one of the largest university presses in the world, and a leading figure in open publishing innovation. The MIT Press is well known for its publications in emerging fields of scholarship, its design excellence, and its pioneering use of technology. Brand’s career spans a wide array of experiences in academia, science communication, and information standards. She received her doctorate in cognitive science from MIT and held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Crossref, Digital Science, and Harvard before returning to MIT in 2015 to serve as Press director. She co-founded the Knowledge Futures Group, which builds open knowledge infrastructure, and was executive producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary Picture a Scientist, a 2020 selection of the Tribeca Film Festival that highlights gender inequality in science. Some of Dr. Brand’s awards include the Laya Wiesner Community Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award, and the Award for Meritorious Achievement from the Council of Science Editors.
 
Chris Bourg is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Prior to assuming her role at MIT, Chris worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She received her BA from Duke University, her MA from the University of Maryland, and her MA and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford.

Chris has extensive experience promoting equitable and open scholarship and is an advocate for the role of libraries in promoting social justice and democracy. Chris co-chaired the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries, the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, and the MIT Working Group on Scholarly Content and Generative AI. She is a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, as well as the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship.

Chris is a member of several advisory boards and steering committees, including Annual Reviews, Center for Open Science, and the Stanford Data Science Institute’s Center for Open and Reproducible Science (DSI-CORES).

Curt Newton leads MIT OpenCourseWare in supporting millions of global learners and educators every year with freely shared materials from over 2,600 MIT courses. Newton joined OpenCourseWare in 2004, shortly after its launch, captivated by the promise of open education, and worked as a Publication Manager and Site Curator prior to becoming Director in 2018. Newton is also a recognized leader in building more effective and equitable climate action through open knowledge practices and resources, at MIT and around the world, through a wide range of professional and civic engagements.

Rebecca Saxe is the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Associate Dean of Science at MIT. She studies the origin and structure of thought in the minds and brains of adults, children, and infants, using behavioral testing, brain imaging, and computational modeling. Her on-going research topics include what people learn from punishment, the role of generosity in social relationships, and the development of the social brain of infants and toddlers. Her OCW course, “Tools for Robust Science”, was also featured on the OCW podcast. Saxe obtained her PhD from MIT and was a Harvard Junior Fellow before joining the MIT faculty in 2006. She has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MIT Committed to Caring Award for graduate mentorship and is a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


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.