Course Texts (coursetexts.org) is a group of volunteers from Harvard and MIT creating a hub of free, open-source lecture notes so that anyone in the world can access world-class educational material.
We built a tool to make it frictionless and fast for professors to turn their existing Canvas websites into a public site.
Only a small fraction of courses at Harvard are publicly available. We want to live in a world where anyone can learn anything for free, no matter the subject. We’re targeting already motivated students and other teachers — with this audience in mind, we care more about volume than polish.
After speaking with some professors, we learned that one of the primary reasons for not publishing their courses publicly is that it takes too much time. Once we have the professor’s consent, our tool converts their existing canvas site to a public page instantly and for free. We also have tools for anyone to suggest improvements or changes for the class, and an admin dashboard for professors to approve.
Having a large volume of courses available publicly would also allow for others to build on top of Course Texts. For example, one could use the professor’s original notes$^1$ to train high quality AI models for education, or the public could create YouTube videos explaining the material.
Our goal is not to replace edX, canvas or other learning initiatives, as we believe Course Texts is complementary to them. We would love to hear any of your ideas for collaboration and are open to working together.
Our goal is to try to open source many courses at Harvard and MIT, especially starting with advanced courses for which there are no other classes online. We do not intend to make any profit from this. We will coordinate with Harvard Open Learning, and are already working with Bharat Anand, Dustin Tingley, and Lawrence Lessig to collect more courses and spearhead administrator conversations.
Eventually, we could experiment with things like an open plugin system, student-uploaded notes, and automatically ADA-compliant, transcribed, student-censored lecture videos.
Currently, we do not use the Harvard name or trademark in or to describe our website. You can see the current wording on coursetexts.org. We are open to change and collaboration here if Harvard desires!
When we ask professors for consent to put their course up, they default to the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (this is the standard one that OCW uses).
$1$: We primarily publish notes produced by the professor, course staff, or a designated scribe or notetaker from the class. We do not support illegally training AI models on copyrighted material or student data (such as discussion posts).