(2003-12-01) Mit Offshoring

How ironic to discover that MIT used Off Shoring for its Open Course Ware development.

*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 MsPowerpoint slide contained the magic word “Delhi”. It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for Open Course Ware 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.*