OpenCourseWare spreading worldwide:"There can be no greater hope for humankind than the belief that wisdom generated through increased learning will ultimately lead to a better world. With OCW, MIT has taken an ethical stand against the belief that knowledge should only be accessible to those who can pay for it or are in proximity to it." - Andrew Wilson of the United Kingdom in October 2003. I think Mr. Wilson expressed the OpenCourseWare (OCW) goal perfectly.
Over the past two years I had to pay around $400 per semester to get case studies from the Harvard Business School. Today there are dozens of MIT Sloan MBA courses up on OCW, and if Sloan is willing to put an entire class up on the web for free, why can't HBS give out their cases for the betterment of the world? I am not concerned about the budgets of MBA students, I am concerned about the people around the world trying to better their understanding of management issues. Imagine you are in Ecuador and studying Corporate Finance through OCW... you have done all the readings associated with the concepts of weighted average cost of capital (WACC) but you can't understand anything about the lecture notes because you can't afford to pay $170 for all the HBS cases associate with the class.... why can't HBS just give away cases like MIT gives away CLASSES?
An even better question is why haven't Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Northwestern, etc. followed and opened up their classes for the betterment of the world?
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