"I had found the blueprint of serious learning"

Josh Michael Luistro has always been curious. Now in his final year of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program at United World College Thailand, he began his academic journey in the Philippines, where an idea shared in class could quickly become hours of exploration at home.  

“I would go home and search for the concept online, fall into a lecture, then open three more tabs and the next thing you know, boom — I’d have 15 tabs open, and my old phone would be lagging significantly,” Luistro says.   

This curiosity eventually led him to MIT Open Learning's OpenCourseWare, a free and open online library of educational resources from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum.  

In 2023, when he was 14, Luistro was looking for academic materials that could take him beyond what he was learning in his classes. In particular, he was interested in economics and mathematics.  

“I found OpenCourseWare and it felt different from almost everything else online,” he says.  

“It made me feel that I had found the blueprint of serious learning.” 

Being able to access syllabi, readings, lecture notes, and problem sets gave structure to his curiosity. “It showed me that learning could be pursued carefully and with discipline, wherever I had my laptop open,” he says. 

Learners can browse OpenCourseWare materials at their own pace, watch lectures, read course notes, and hear from faculty experts. These resources are also available on MIT Learn, the platform for all of MIT’s lifelong learning offerings, with AI-enabled personalized learning capabilities. 

The wealth of content initially drew Luistro to OpenCourseWare. But the courses made him feel empowered and capable, even as a high school student, and that is what kept him coming back. 

“Open Learning resources like OpenCourseWare gave me serious material and trusted me to do something with it,” Luistro says. “It taught me the difference between encountering a topic and actually sitting with it. OpenCourseWare never made curiosity seem small; it genuinely made curiosity feel like the beginning of real work.”   

In the three years since Luistro began using Open Learning resources, four courses stand out as especially influential: Econometrics, Public Economics I, Linear Algebra (Communications Intensive), and Advanced Strategy. 

Linear algebra made mathematics come alive for him and demonstrated the importance of clearly communicating complex ideas. Advanced Strategy helped Luistro see the bigger picture of economics questions. 

“Econometrics changed the way I read the world,” Luistro says, explaining that the course showed him how much data relies on interpretation and context and helped develop his ability to ask questions about causality and evidence.  

Public economics proved to be intellectually and personally meaningful.  

 “Taxation, public spending, welfare, incentives, inequality, and the role of the state are deeply human topics and are deeply related to me and my culture,” Luistro says. “They are about how societies decide who carries burdens, who receives support, and what kind of future a government chooses to build. Public economics gave me a language for questions I had already been carrying as a student from the Philippines, questions about why development is uneven and why public resources matter.” 

Luistro says his career goals are still developing, but he knows that he wants the opportunity to bring an analytic, public-minded perspective to economic and developmental strategies. That could lead him to a career in policy development, investment banking, international relations, among other avenues. He’s open to all of it. And he is certain that MIT’s free and open educational resources will be part of his journey, helping him to stretch the limits of his knowledge. 

 “These resources taught me to begin before I felt fully ready, to realize that there is an option to pause when something was becoming difficult, return to it, and keep going,” Luistro says. “They taught me that confusion can be part of serious learning rather than a sign to stop.”   

He adds, “MIT OpenCourseWare turned my curiosity into a compass and gave a student from the Philippines the courage to follow it.”