Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India.  But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort:  OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given).  During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system.  In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.

The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show.  A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them.  The answer:  "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."

Students began to wake up.

A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi".  It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.

# Posted by Philip Greenspun on 12/1/03; 10:57:50 AM - Comments [22] Trackback [2]