To advance knowledge and education  

From Wired:

When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program - dubbed OpenCourseWare - would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity - and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required.

Many of the courses are already online here, including several from their vaunted economics department. I think this is a tremendous development, and not just because it will benefit me! It has the potential to really rearrange the way we think about intellectual property and knowledge - the problems MIT faces are the big ones facing any information revolution in a capitalist world. So far they seem to be handling the rollout with great vision and generosity.

MORE: A reader at MIT points out that there isn't much you couldn't have found on faculty websites before, if you'd looked hard enough. I don't doubt this is true, but at the same time, grouping them under the same umbrella and making them official really adds to their value. I don't know how many times I've gone fishing for academic content and stumbled across half a dozen dubious syllabi from universities I've never even heard of. For me, an MIT syllabus (and course notes, even!) specifically authorized by MIT scares away a lot of those doubts...