When Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Charles Vest spoke at the university’s commencement in June 2002, he made a promise. MIT would be an open university and engender free access to education by publishing documentation from more than 500 of its courses on the Internet.

As he put it: “We will launch the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative—a program that will make the basic educational materials for 2,000 of our subjects available on the Web—available to anyone, anywhere, free of charge,” he said. “Why would we do this? Because we see it as part of our mission: to help to raise the quality of higher education in every corner of the globe.”

It was a tall order, and one that required a great deal of teamwork and innovation, according to Ann Margulies, MIT OCW’s executive director. Margulies said that the huge amount of information, as much as a million resources that required publishing to the site, required a robust, yet flexible, content management system. Visitors to the site needed to access the syllabi, lecture notes and calendars of 500 courses, as well as supporting materials such as multimedia simulations, problem sets and solutions, past exams, reading lists, sample MIT student projects and a selection of video lectures.

As a result, MIT had trouble finding a system that would fit the bill. Many worked well for document-based content, while others were more designed for multimedia-based content. MIT needed a system that could support both with equal ease – inexpensively. After much searching, however, the university hit on a highly customized version of Microsoft’s Content Management System (CMS), built with the help of Microsoft partner Sapient Corp. Based on Microsoft’s .Net, the CMS lets professors and other coursework authors publish their courseware and additional materials directly to the Web. The result is an easy to manage and maintain solution, Margulies said.

And it was a quick implementation as well, she said. “When we first realized that we needed a content management system, experts told us it would take a year to implement one,” Margulies said. “But as a result of Sapient and Microsoft working so closely together, here we are --10 months after making our content management server decision -- with a smoothly running system supporting our complex publishing process.”

Since the program is free, many people wonder why MIT didn’t go with an open source content management solution for the project. Margulies said that at the time the project was begun, there was no viable open source solution that could meet MIT’s capacity and implementation timeline requirements. Microsoft’s product offered a high level of usability for the end users, faculty and staff, and had a much lower total cost of ownership compared with other systems the school evaluated, she said. Still, the university is keeping an eye on the open source movement. At this point, MIT OCW is monitoring six different solutions: Zope, Red Hat, Midgard, OpenACS, OpenCMS and Bricolage.

But until those are ready for prime time, MIT is sticking with its customized version of CMS. And it has fit the bill so well that MIT’s OCW project won an award from InfoWorld magazine as part of the InfoWorld 100.

The magazine’s InfoWorld 100 recognizes companies that make the best use of technology to enhance their businesses. According to Steve Fox, editor-in-chief of InfoWorld, MIT won because it “built an innovative content management system that met critical technical and business objectives.”

For more information, visit MIT’s OCW site here.