Ithaka

Ithaka organizes and preserves academic knowledge and, with its partners, has built a powerful infrastructure for preserving research reports, data sets, plant specimens, art objects, and more. In 2009, Ithaka acquired JSTOR, the single most important platform for preserving scholarly records. It has also incubated the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, which helps small liberal arts colleges integrate the latest in information technology into their teaching, learning, and scholarship. This general operating support grant would represent Special Projects’ last grant to Ithaka.

In 2008, the Hewlett Foundation granted Ithaka $180,000 to execute a project on the history, development, current state, and future prospects of open courseware initiatives at MIT and elsewhere. That project has since evolved into a broad and deep comparative analysis of a variety of online courseware initiatives—open and proprietary, past and present, foreign and domestic—from some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Jointly funded by ITHAKA and the Hewlett Foundation, the project launched in June 2008 and is expected to be completed in over the course of 2010 in anticipation of a January, 2011 publication date for its central output: a scholarly monograph, provisionally titled Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to their Courses (forthcoming, Princeton University Press). We are recommending additional funds to support publicizing and disseminating Unlocking the Gates’s findings to ensure that the Hewlett-funded research output realizes its maximum potential impact.