From Bold Idea to Global Legacy: 25 Years of MIT OpenCourseWare

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
• Collaborators across the global open education and open knowledge networks

Symposium Program

10:00–10:10 AM
From Bold Idea to Global Legacy: 25 Years of MIT OpenCourseWare 
Welcome remarks from Dimitris Bertsimas and Curt Newton.

10:10–10:30 AM
Opening Remarks from MIT President Sally Kornbluth 
President Kornbluth will reflect on OCW’s impact and the Institute’s leadership in open knowledge.

10:30–11:00 AM
OCW @ 25: A Story in Motion
Premiere of a new short documentary celebrating OCW’s origins, influence, and global reach, followed by a panel with key MIT contributors who have helped shape OCW’s worldwide influence.

About the Speakers

Dimitris Bertsimas is the Vice Provost for Open Learning at MIT, the Associate Dean of Business Analytics, the Associate Dean of Online Education & Artificial Intelligence, the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, and a Professor of Operations Research at MIT Sloan School of Management. At MIT Open Learning, he oversees Open Learning’s product offerings, new initiatives, infrastructure, finances, and operations.

A faculty member at MIT since 1988, he has made significant contributions in the areas of optimization, stochastic systems, machine learning, and their applications across various fields, including healthcare, transportation, and finance.

Curt Newton leads MIT OpenCourseWare in supporting millions of global learners and educators every year with freely shared materials from over 2,500 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.

Since becoming MIT’s 18th president in 2023, Sally Kornbluth has rallied the community to help solve the great challenges of our time. She and her leadership team have launched a series of initiatives to enable faculty to “go big” with their most daring ideas and to inspire new collaborations across disciplines and institutions. Priority areas include health and life sciences, manufacturing, climate, the humanities, generative AI, and quantum.

After graduating from Williams College in 1982 with a BA in political science, Kornbluth made a sharp pivot toward biology. In 1984, she earned a BA in genetics at Cambridge University, and in 1989, received her PhD in molecular oncology from Rockefeller University. She joined Duke University in 1994 as an assistant professor and rose to full professor in 2005. The next year, she was selected to serve as vice dean for basic science at the Duke School of Medicine, a post she held until she became provost in 2014. Among other honors, she is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ana Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, where she focuses on introductory computer science education. She teaches and develops MIT’s foundational programming courses, working to make rigorous computer science accessible to beginners.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia and her PhD from Princeton University. During graduate school, she discovered a passion for teaching while serving as a teaching assistant, which ultimately led her to pursue a lecturer position. At MIT, she contributes to the introductory computer science curriculum from multiple angles: expanding access for non-majors, developing active learning strategies for large lecture environments, and supporting digital learning and online course delivery.

Whether teaching in person or online, she emphasizes that learning to program is like learning a new language that requires consistent practice, patience, and time. Her teaching style focuses on building student confidence while maintaining high academic standards, drawing on research from the learning sciences to inform course design. She emphasizes computational thinking as a foundational problem-solving skill and is passionate about helping students experience their "aha" moments.

Christopher Capozzola is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2022 to 2025, Christopher Capozzola served as Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning. In that role, he oversaw open education offerings including OpenCourseWare and MITx, as well as the Digital Credentials Consortium, Digital Learning in Residential Education, and MIT Video Productions. He continues to facilitate conversations about generative AI in teaching and learning at MIT, and advocate for open, affordable, and equitable post-secondary learning in U.S. higher education.

For more than 20 years, Capozzola has taught U.S. history at MIT, and is the author of two books on U.S. political history. He graduated from Harvard College and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002.

Dr. Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics and the Chairman of the Economics Department at MIT. He is also the former Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the former President of the American Society of Health Economists and the Eastern Economics Association. He has published more than 200 research articles, has edited seven research volumes, and has written three books including Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text in its 7th edition. In 2006 he received the American Society of Health Economists Inaugural Medal for the best health economist in the nation aged 40 and under.

During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department. He was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and served on the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort. During 2009-2010 he served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the Administration and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011 he was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” by Slate Magazine.

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.