When American Megan Brewster first moved abroad, she noticed that her new hometown was littered with empty plastic water bottles.

A recent graduate of the University of Washington with a bachelor’s degree in material science, Brewster was in Guatemala working for an environmental nonprofit company. Each day she saw tourists discarding their empty water bottles on the sidewalks and curbs, further adding to a plastic clutter that seemed to be everywhere.

Guatemala had no formal recycling program, so Brewster set out to find a practical method by which plastics could be recycled into useable products. She visited the online OpenCourseWare (OCW) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which provided open access to course materials for a large number of MIT classes, and found what she was looking for: a Material Processing Laboratory class. From this resource, she was able to formulate and implement a complete protocol to tackle Guatemala’s need for a plastics recycling system.

OCW’s formal roots began in the United States when MIT launched its OCW site in 2002 with 50 offerings. Since the fall of 2007, MIT has had 1,800 courses available. By 2004, MIT administrators were being regularly contacted by other university administrators wanting insights on how to develop OCW programs of their own.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium, a global network of universities with OCW programs, defines OpenCourseWare as, “free and open digital publication of high quality education materials, organized as a course.” Users, who do not receive credit and are usually anonymously logged in, are students looking to enhance personal knowledge, educators or self-learners, says Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT’s OCW program. The content varies from university to university and may have a combination of elements such as lecture notes, quizzes, exams, video clips and audio lectures.

A Movement in the Making?