New Podcast: Professor JoAnne Yates on Making MIT Sloan Teaching Materials Openly Available

The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Professor JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Deputy Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She speaks about the new MIT Sloan website that offers case studies, teaching videos, and other innovative instructional resources openly to anyone with access to the internet.
Professor JoAnne Yates
Professor Yates explains why MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is an open access site, what is innovative about its approach and content, and why it matters for business education. She reflects on the decision-making that went into offering the content openly, commenting that “the notion of giving it away to the world seemed to us the right notion,” even though some people at other business schools “wanted to know whether we were crazy” for giving this content away when other schools charge for it. She addresses this in the context of Sloan’s mission to develop “principled leaders who make a positive difference in the world,” noting that Sloan’s focus is unusual among business schools in that it includes “bettering the planet.”

The growing site will include innovative tools such as “management flight simulators” — dynamic models that demonstrate how intuitions are often wrong, and material for underserved content areas like global entrepreneurship, industry evolution, and sustainability.

Professor Yates, a member of the Ad-hoc Faculty Committee on Open Access Publishing, links the decision to make the content open access to MIT’s culture of openness and experience with OpenCourseWare. She says “I’m very proud of the fact that MIT makes all this material open to the world and that we started that [OpenCourseWare] movement… MIT… understands it owes something to the world and it tries to give back to the world. That’s something that makes many of us who work here very proud. It’s easy to want to follow in these footsteps.”

Download the audio file. (20:56 minutes; 19MB)

For more information, see the MSTIR site.


The other episodes in the podcast series are available on the scholarly publication website.

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