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MIT OpenCourseWare Now Online
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 30, 2002 02:29 PM
from the home-schooling dept.
from the home-schooling dept.
peter303 writes "A sampling of MIT's OpenCourseWare selections appered online today. The courses cover a full range of departments, but only a couple apiece. The material ranges ranges from just syllabi and calendars to extensive on-line course notes and interative demos. To succeed, OpenCourseWare must also be an advantage to MIT faculty and students, as well as the outside world. I think this may be possible, because it gives a uniform appearance and access point for online material, plus tools to build these."
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A little dissapointed (Score:3, Interesting)
Others have only thin offerings, such as lecture notes alone. In some cases the lecture notes are extensive, but in others they are just minimal outlines of the lecture and are not useful if you did not attend this lecture. (These could be made useful if video lectures were subsequently provided)
I'm interested to see if other course directors follow the lead of the better prepared OCW sites. I think there is great potential, but it remains to be seen exactly how OCW will fare.
Building a University online (Score:5, Insightful)
Now when do I receive my diploma in the mail for as little as $39.95 as the email stated?
Not all of it is online (Score:3, Interesting)
The required text is Writing Economics by Neugeboren and Jacobson. You do not need to buy it. A copy will be provided for you. You are expected to read this text and follow its instructions in the work you hand in for this class, even though we will not cover the text in detail in the lectures. Other texts you might want to consult are A Guide for the Young Economist by Thomson, The Practice of Econometrics: Classic and Contemporary by Berndt, Elements of Style by Strunk and White, Stata® manuals, and The MIT Undergraduate Journal of Economics.
Humpf. So where do I sign up for that?
Clarity (Score:4, Insightful)
At least they are offering some resources which might help those who have trouble communicating well in their written work.
I guess one might argue that writing well is something that you learn by writing often. You can buy books that will help you, but this is one of those courses that you won't master through acquiring new facts from your text.
Credit where credit is due... (Score:3, Funny)
Education is changing. (Score:3, Interesting)
The role of education in modern society, however, is under question, since the ability to look up facts instantly (rather than knowing them) can make people appear to be a lot smarter than they really are.
I have no problem with this. I'd rather people had common sense and an ability to use information, rather than just being a know-all.
If you need to hire a programmer to write a proprietary TCP/IP driver for your new device, you can hire someone who a) is expensive and a TCP/IP driver expert, or b) someone who is cheaper, very smart, can turn their hands to anything, and uses the Internet to research how TCP/IP drivers work. Most companies these days would choose person B.
And the main point?
Education is overrated, since anyone with a decent IQ and a large reference library (say.. the Internet) can work out how to do things that you once needed a degree to do.
Re:Education is changing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Education is changing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Memorizing the Constitution is fine, but it aint going to get you a job. Knowing how to think logically and knowing when you don't know something is the key to being successful in most careers.
Only two Comp Sci & Eng courses... (Score:1)
One of them is a lab and the other seems to haved little to do with Computer Science - something about transportation planning.
I would have expected the Comp Sci department to be at the forefront in this experiment in online course materials.
An opportunity.. (Score:2)
Taking the same things remotely / autonomously sounds impossible.
When they put the courseware for St. Clair County Community College online, it might me a bit more accessible to us commoners.
Quite the opposite (Score:4, Insightful)
Another reason this is cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Not new, but special (Score:4, Informative)
But MIT is doing two things that are real steps forward. First, they're settings standards: instructors are expected to post certain kinds of information in a standard format. Existing course web sites are just online alternatives to photocopied class handouts, and it's up the individual instructors exactly what they bother to put online and how they present it.
But what's really staggering is MIT's attitude towards public use of this material. Most course web sites are created specifically for the students taking the course -- public access is an accidental side effect, and probably wouldn't happen at all if University web sites secured their networks properly. They'd probably be taken down or hidden behind a firewall if public access started taxing the servers. Which is completely different from what MIT is doing: investing in servers and bandwidth for no other purpose than to enable public access to their content.
First impressions about one of the courses... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hope this doesn't replace the tradition of..... (Score:3, Funny)
MIT Degree Not Promised... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Copyright Law (partly) gets in the way of putting all the course materials online. The other problem is sheer volume. It's going to take awhile before they figure out how to get all the stuff up there. Some subjects will work better than others. Math will probably do well, history will probably be not so good because of percentage of copyrighted stuff used in history courses versus math courses.
It will get better and richer as they figure it out. It'll definitely be a good resource but it'll never be an MIT (TM) education.
The software behind the site? (Score:2, Interesting)
At my school [utdallas.edu] we have a system that I assume we purhased called WebCT, and, frankly, it sucks. In fact for a supposedly technology driven school, we have some crappy resources. A bunch of sun workstations and 6 dollar copies of Windows XP, whoopteedo. I digress.
However, in my rhetoric class we handle all document management (turning in papers, journal entries, teachers notes, etc) via an online service [utexas.edu] provided by the University of Texas Austin. Aside from some really hokey things (strands of learning? that sounds rather new age) it is an interesting way to turn in papers and recieve feedback. It is pretty raw, but it has potential.
It is supposedly going to be open sourced (it is a php/mysql thing, I know because I saw the standard mysql overload page on it one day). Any other schools have systems like this? UTDallas does not, but then again, UTDallas sucks.
the purpose of open course wear isn't for dist. ed (Score:5, Informative)
- to promote communication at MIT. They hope that everyone will be able to quickly find out what other people are teaching, what textbooks they're using, what's being covered, and what's not being covered.
- "open source" the resources that go into course production. Obviously, then, to make this same information available to scholars elsewhere, so that teachers at other places can see what MIT is doing and borrow resources, compare notes, make suggested changes.
- Challenge typical lecture classes. I think that they're hoping to challenge MIT faculty to think of what the 'value added' is to classes, so that people realize that learning is about more than 'dumping content' into students' heads, and consider the pedagogical use of classes more carefully.
- Provide resources for self-study. Sure-- there is a hope that someone out there in Alaska or something will take up some resources and teach themselves something.
- Challenging notions of what is university IP or not. As many know, who owns what syllabi that is produced by faculty is hairy; if MIT puts it on the web, they hope that this will deflate the whole debate, and make everyone realize that a syllabus is not synonymous with learning.
- Provide a model for the universities in online spaces. I think they're hoping that this will at least challenge people to think beyond 'how can we make a buck off putting courses online' and realize the role that universities could play in a networked age for contributing to the intellectual commons.
As I understand it, those are the purposes of open coursewear, roughly. They're really not thinking that people will train themselves so much, as they're thinking that it will help change the nature of discourse around universities in online education.The key is interacctive collaboration with the aud (Score:1)
I wonder whether this is good (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress. A diversity of approaches to problems results from a diversity of different experiences. That oddball approach some professor is teaching at a small university may just be the basis for the next important breakthrough, or at least make the school's graduates fill some important niche in science and engineering not as well filled by others.
It's like languages, cultures, genetics, and ecology: we really do lose something important when global communications carry a few dominant paradigms (or organisms) everywhere. Monocultures of the mind may be more risky and costly than monocultures of plants.
Good iniciative, but... (Score:2, Funny)
<br>
Ive found that many universities put online material for students, obviously THEIR student, but anyway is on the net, and many persons, included me, use this material in order to get ideas for classes, exercises, exams, etc. <br>
Ive read some MIT courses material (from opencourseware), and it seems great, but not to much... coming from MIT...
To be pedantic... (Score:1)
Great... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's delightful to know that people still want to make sure that knowledge will remain free.
Course information online isn't new., but... (Score:2)
The difference was that access was password protected. The University viewed the material as property and expected people to pay for the classes to have access to it. If you wern't in the class, you didn't get to look at the material. After all, if you can get the material for free, why would you pay for a distance education class?
"Back in the day" all sorts of university course and research information was available online - but then universities started taking most of it down. The information being online is unremarkable - that it's available for free is the unique part.
I've already sent links to my students (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it's a nit. I'm flagging it anyway. (Score:2)
Apparently not from the English department, though...
Interesting, but (Score:2)
Some journals are available on-line, and public libraries often have access to databases for fee-based articles, but pulling the articles togetehr will often be difficult. Compounding this is the use of case studies, which are cash cows for schools such as Harvard. What would be real helpful is the availability of inexpensive ecucational access (with limited d/ls per month to keep non-ed users out) to anyone so they could get the 50 or articles/cases they need.
Th etrade off is the potential loss of sales to traditional users (which can be as much as $20/student/qtr per class at BSchool) who get cases and articles online for less vs the addin sales potential as on-line use increases.
At least MIT is pushing in the right direction.
I like it (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes me wish . . . (Score:1)
instead of 30
Already some overlap from ArsDigita University (Score:1)
The Birth of a New Spam Product (Score:2)
Classroom doesn't work online... (Score:2)
However, classroom learning *does not* really translate well online. Online coursework, if it's serious at all, requires a whole different approach- including several different kinds of interactivity. For MIT to offer *real* online coursework, it would require designing it specifically for that purpose, and probably producing it entirely separately. The reality is two separate universities- cyberspace and meatspace.
That said, this is still pretty neat.
The format is RealAudio (Score:1)
It seems that the lecture videos format (at least for Linear Algebra, which I checked) is Realplayer's [mit.edu]. Anyone knows whether it'll be provided in a friendlier format as well?
Higher Education Online (Score:1, Informative)
Regardless, among the few institutions really puting what they have out there for anyone to benefit, Columbia University [columbia.edu] so far has the most to offer. Few schools come close to Columbia's Interactive department as far as content beyond an online syllabus. MIT seems to be in the right track, until they start making access to the general public impossible. I don't think it should be free (as it isn't at CI or Harvard), but at least reachable. Some other schools simply block access and give no options to outsiders/non-students.
From a purely business perspective, as some one else already pointed out, making content available to outsiders gives University recruiters a great "businesscard".
Its so easy to do ! (Score:1)
MIT has done the simple (administratively complex) task of putting all this together and putting it online at one central place.
UC Irvine [uci.edu] has a similar effort [uci.edu]; all UCI courses *have* to have a website with most of the course material online. I hope they see this MIT effort and take it to the next level of making it completely open and useful for the whole world.
Does Microsoft's Defense Team Write This Stuff? (Score:1, Offtopic)
This sounds like Microsoft's commonly-touted line: "We didn't drive them out of business. Their incompetence drove them out of business." Is he teaching software engineering or business? He should stick to the former, because he's either inept or well-paid when it comes to the latter.
--pedantic (Score:1)
Every 'java' is replaced by:
http://ocw.mit.edu/6/6.170/f01/tools/index.html [mit.edu]
adds a little TM symbol to every 'java'.
Results in pages that read like Scientology Fan Fiction [somethingawful.com]
We have this idea at Cornell, kinda (Score:1)
If MIT's page set turns out nice, is fast, and provides me another source of information in even greater detail than just HowStuffWorks.com then I think this is a great thing for all us non-MIT world members.
In terms of MIT students and faculty, these pages provide employeers a glimpse of what the course offerings really cover, hopefully conveying the idea to potential employeers of students that they truely did get a good background in the material they may claim to on their resumes'.
5.61 (Score:1)
Increased quality of educational plagerism (Score:1)
No substitute for those crusty profs... (Score:1)
The way they described it..... (Score:1)
Included in the discussion was a Prof. from MIT talking about the "Open Sourcing" of their curriculum.
The way they layed it out at the time was fairly clear: This is not to be an online university, it is an open set of classes that a professor might use to improve or replace his existing class with.
From that view it seems they're coming along fairly well.
Great start, lets take the next steps. (Score:2)
Now the next steps.
1. Start publishing textbooks online. The only people who make money off of textbooks anyway are the publishers and bookstores. Why not make the material freely available? Textbooks published by professors at public universities should be made available with an open copyright. Textbooks have become very expensive and limit a student's access to material. I used to try to read at least one other textbook in addition to the one that was assigned in class.
2. Start publishing papers online. This is the same situation. A professor writes a paper that is published in the IEEE Transactions on XXXXXX. The information is now copyrighted and I have to pay to read it. This limits a student's access to the material.
Freeing up this material and making it available electronically would have a strong effect on education and research.
Nice! (Score:1)
As some people noted, this is in no way revolutionary as practically every university has webpages for each of their courses. Atleast at the university where I'm studying (Helsinki University of Technology) we usually get good lecture notes from the lecturer as a complement to whatever book we're using, but they never get published on the course's webpage. This is unfortunate, as many other people could benefit from these lecture notes if they were put online. There's lots of good quality material in different universities and I'm grateful to the lecturers who put their notes online. When trying to learn material covered on different courses I usually make a little search on the web trying to find lecture notes of the subject.
I hope many more universities make it a policy to publish their material. I think this would also reduce the amounts of rushed or otherwise bad lecture notes, as I don't think anyone will put handwritten scanned lecture notes online, so everyone would have to typeset them on a computer. This is something you have to struggle with in the introductory math courses here at HUT...
Something Nobody has Mentioned Yet (Score:2)
Last Post! (Score:1)
their favorite animal, one could guarantee the health and prosperity
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the squaws of the other two hides.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Uh... yeah... right... (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea behind applied sciences is that it's real-world preparation, and in the real world, you're allowed to look at books if you don't know how to do something.
*Everything* should be more extensive (Score:1)
Re:not much difference (Score:2)
Re:Mathematics should have been more extensive. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What is the fascination with PDF files? (Score:1)