Year-End Stats from MIT Point to Increasing Popularity of Open Educational Resources

Like many sites and services, MIT OpenCourseWare has released some of its user statistics from 2010. An initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) provides open access to the core academic content – syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and video lectures – from over 2300 MIT courses, almost the entire curriculum of the school.

The figures show strong growth for what is one of the world’s premier open educational resources, with an increase in visits and visitors between 2009 and 2010.

Posted by MIT OpenCourseWare’s Steve Carson, here are some of the statistics from MIT OCW’s 2010:

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• 17.5 million visits
• 9.6 million visitors
• 1.82 visits per visitor
• 98.3 million page views (a little lower than 2009)
• 5.63 page views per visit
• 1.9 million zip files downloaded
• 11.8 million files downloaded from iTunes U
• 7.3 million videos viewed on YouTube
• 275,000 visits from the MIT community
• 446,000 visits referred by StumbleUpon, 172,000 by Reddit, 112,000 by Wikipedia, 95,000 by YouTube, and 78,000 by Facebook
• 38% of visits used Firefox, 33% used IE, 15% used Chrome, and 10% used Safari

Notable among these figures are users’ preferences for content delivery via iTunes U and YouTube, as opposed to downloading a zip file containing a course package. Also interesting: visitors from the MIT community are only 1% of those who use the service, successfully fulfilling the program’s mission of “open sharing of MIT teaching materials with educators, students, and self-learners around the world.”

Erroneous reports last year suggested that MIT OCW was investigating a paywall for its courses, but as we reported in October, that’s not in the works. And as part of building a sustainable opencourseware ecosystem, MIT OCW has teamed up with the social learning network OpenStudy in order to provide study groups for those working their way through OCW curriculum.

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