The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced a grant of $5.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and another for the same amount from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for OpenCourseWare, an initiative to make nearly all the school's curriculum materials available online for free.

The grants will support the 27-month start-up and pilot phase of the project. The second, implementation phase of the initiative is predicted to take up to six years to complete.

"Our hope," said Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest, "is that this project will inspire similar efforts at other institutions and will reinforce the concept that ideas are best viewed as the common property of all of us, not as proprietary products intended to generate profits. We salute President Vest and his colleagues at MIT for having the courage to launch this forward-looking initiative. We are pleased to join with the Mellon Foundation in providing start-up funding."

The OpenCourseWare Web site will offer lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for courses across the school's entire curriculum, including architecture and planning, engineering, the arts and humanities, the social sciences, management, and science.