For stay-at-home parents, motivated teachers and students overseas, a top-notch education is now only a click away.

MIT is proceeding with the next phase of its “distance learning” project, the OpenCourseWare (OCW) Initiative and if the $100 million, 10-year plan is successful, lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments for all of MIT’s courses will be accessible on-line at no cost.

The OCW initiative will allow people to access the source materials MIT students use, but will not offer correspondence courses.

OCW represents a growing trend in what is termed “distance learning,” which involves offering courses or course materials to an on-line audience.

Laura Koller, head of the OCW Transition Project Team, said that the experimental stage of this initiative is slated to run until March of 2002.

To test the new technology, OCW is making available materials from twenty to thirty courses on the web.

Eventually, OCW will feature material from all of MIT’s nearly 2,000 courses.

This information will be free “to anybody anywhere in the world,” Koller said.

According to MIT Professor Steven R. Lerman, chair of the OCW Interim Management Board, the range of courses chosen for the trial period were selected because of their “diversity.”

The OCW team was “looking for a mix of courses that [featured] a different style of teaching,” he said.

Some of the courses are centered around lab work, while others are lecture or project focused.

“We wanted to get a spectrum of faculty and teaching style,” Lerman said.

The OCW initiative is hoped to reach a broad audience with their free course materials, Lerman said, including three distinct audiences.

According to Lerman, non-MIT teachers may benefit from the program because they will be able to integrate the course material into their own lesson plans.

The information would also be readily available to countries that lack the infrastructure to develop teaching plans and lessons on par with those in other more advanced nations.