If you’ve never watched an online lecture from MIT, you are apparently in the minority. According to recently released statistics, more than 10 million people are now using MIT’s OpenCourseWare Project. The OCW shares syllabi, exams, notes, problem sets, lectures, and even some discussions for just over 2,000 courses. (Discussions are held through online study groups using OpenStudy.
As you can see in the infographic below, the number of courses and users from 2003-2007 steadily climbed. Take a look at the key figures below to see the most recent data set (from 2010).
Key Figures
source: MIT
- 17.5 M visits
- 9.6 M visitors
- 1.82 visits per visitor
- 98.3 M page views (actually a little lower than last year, but a sign our site redesign is helping folks to find content faster)
- 5.63 page views per visit
- 1.9 M zip files downloaded
- 11.8 M files downloaded from iTunes U
- 7.3 M videos viewed on YouTube
- 275 K visits from the MIT community (from GA, not WebTrends; WT is not reading this one right)
- 446 K visits referred by StumbleUpon; 172 K by Reddit; 112 K by Wikipedia; 95 K by YouTube; 78 K by Facebook
- 38% of visits used Firefox; 33% used IE; 15% used Chrome; 10% used Safari
How Do You Use OCW?
What do you think? Have you ever used the OCW system? I have viewed more than a few hours of footage in an effort to tackle some problems for work, web design, and more. It’s a great resource and I’d love to hear if / how you’ve used MIT’s OCW.
About the Author
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Angela Maiers, Paulo Simões, Ivan Diego Meseguer, Pam Lowe and others. Pam Lowe said: 10 Million Learners Using MIT's Open Course Ware: http://bit.ly/e1M6y9 #edchat [...]
These are fantastic numbers, and it is great for MIT.
How, however, do 10m users of OCW suggest that everyone else is in the minority? 10M is a small fraction of the US population, and an even tinier fraction of the world's population.
Hi ! Great work, I read the column, continue the nice work.
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