Why Not Attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, While Still in High School?

The significance for High Schools and the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative is that MIT is extending their offerings to the secondary level.

More than 60% of those people who accessed MIT were from Asian countries but it would make sense that Americans can take advantage of this unprecedented access to knowledge.

The outreach to High Schools by MIT is called "Highlights for High School," which aims to bolster high school education through free and open course materials, from complete curricula and syllabi to videos, lecture notes, and animations.

You can not earn a diploma online but you can access MIT courses.

Highlights for High School is also known as OpenCourseWare Secondary Education, or OCW SE.

On the new site, there are thousands of resources designed just for high school teachers and students, including:

* 15,000 lecture notes;
* 1,800 syllabi;
* 2,600 videos, audio clips, and animations taken from actual MIT courses;
* 9,000 assignments; and
* 900 assessments.

The reason MIT put the materials online is clear.

"As has been well documented, the [United States] needs to invest more in secondary education, particularly in STEM fields. MIT as a leading institution of science and technology has an obligation to help address the issue,"

said Thomas Magnanti, former dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, who chaired the committee that developed Highlights for High School.

Cf. Highlights for High School