MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.
As of May 2018, over 2,400 courses were available online. While a few of these were limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also included interactive web demonstrations in Java, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures. As of May 2018, 100 courses included complete video lectures. The videos were available in streaming mode, but could also be downloaded for viewing offline. All video and audio files were also available from YouTube, iTunes U and the Internet Archive.