The Mellon Foundation and Hewlett Foundation will provide 11 million dollars in grants to support the new online OpenCourseWare (OCW) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the university announced June 18.

The money, coupled with a million dollars from MIT, will fund the initial pilot phase of OCW, which aims to provide its entire curriculum—lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments—online, free of charge.

“MIT’s pledge to share its entire curriculum, and to place its entire institution behind this ambitious effort, could transform the way in which content is made available to all who want access to it,” commented William G. Bowen, president of the Mellon Foundation.

The first phase of OCW will go online next fall with the goal of putting 500 courses on the Internet. All of MIT’s course material will be available within eight years, according to the initial timetable.

OCW’s first staff members were to begin early this month, according to Steven R. Lerman, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Paul Brest, president of the Hewlett Foundation, said his foundation presented the grant to MIT to encourage similar efforts in higher education.

“Our hope…is that this project will inspire similar efforts at other institutions and will reinforce the concept that ideas are best viewed as the common property of all of us, not as proprietary products intended to generate profits,” he said.

MIT officials cautioned though that OCW would not serve as a substitute for an MIT degree, since no credit will be given and participants will not be graded on their efforts or comprehension.

Instead, OCW is meant as a supplement to an MIT education or any education, according to MIT President Charles M. Vest.

—Katherine E. McCormack contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.