Better than Vegas

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The Jameel Poverty Action Lab is only one of many projects at MIT focused on fighting the ravages of poverty. Amy Smith, for instance, works with MIT students to engineer low-tech ways to meet the day-to-day challenges of people in the developing world, from a low-cost grain mill that grinds flour 10 times faster than traditional tools do to an incubator for lab samples that requires no electricity, allowing doctors to diagnose tuberculosis in remote areas. In April, our students, through their own Global Poverty Initiative, hosted a conference that brought to campus more than 1,000 young people dedicated to tackling poverty.

Yet perhaps the most powerful tools to offer people in the developing world are knowledge and analytical skills they can use themselves. Today, MIT's OpenCourseWare makes materials for virtually all of the Institute's 1,800 courses available online, to anyone on earth, free (see ocw.mit.edu). Many courses have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, with Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish versions on the way.

Since MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001, more than 40 million people around the world have used the site. We regularly receive e-mails from teachers, students, and self-learners, explaining how MIT OpenCourseWare has improved their teaching or changed their lives. One woman from Latin America wrote a note of thanks, because OpenCourseWare opens "a window of knowledge for so many who are limited by economic or other reasons," as she put it; "It's truly a way to spread freedom to humankind." We hope she's right.

A version of this column by President Susan Hockfield ran in the Boston Globe on April 14, 2008.