MIT's OpenCourseWare Program

Kent Simon writes "Many people may not know that MIT has initiated OpenCourseWare, an initiative to share all of their educational resources with the public. This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free, open, and available. It's a great resource for people looking to improve their knowledge of our world. OpenCourseWare should prove exceptionally beneficial to those who may not be able to afford the quality of education offered at a school like MIT. Here's a link to all currently available courses. It is expected that by the end of the year every course offered at MIT will be available on the OpenCourseWare site, including lecture notes, homework assignments, and exams. OpenCourseWare is not offered to replace collegiate education, but rather to spread knowledge freely."

Classical MIT style is not free

[MLopat]

This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free

My tuition there was in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago. Not complaining. I loved course VI. But free, is not typical MIT style, because as we all know, you get what you pay for.

HP != MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

The following analogy is apt.

HP:MIT :: fat-penguin:F-22

That MIT is providing essentially free knowledge is excellent news. Many intelligent people engage in self-study on various topics and need challenging homework assignments with solutions. Doing exercise problems without solutions means that you could, possibly, learn the material incorrectly and never actually realize your misunderstanding. After all, quantum mechanics is not intuitive.

Your misunderstanding could lead to a malfunctioning nuclear bomb. You want to do it right the first time.

Coursework isnt the point of college

[jorghis]

The course itself is not the point of going to college. If you did this instead of taking a course you would be missing out on the interaction with the professor as well as the connections/letters of recommendation you would get if you were actually attending MIT.

On top of that you could take those open courses and understand the material better than anyone, but who do you think an employer is going to hire/grad school is going to admit? The guy who said he went through the open courses on MITs website or the guy who graduated from MIT.

This isnt anything particularly new, you could always go shell out fifty bucks for a textbook and read the thing. Noone would consider that as valuable as a college education though.

One of the sad truths about higher education is that 99% of the time the degree itself and the connections you made in college are far more valuable than anything you actually learned in school.

I've used it regularly

[miyako]

I've used open courseware for a while now to do a few different courses. My University degree was informative, but there were certainly bits of information I missed out on. More importantly, since I graduated from school several months ago, it's been easy to get into the habbit of not thinking too much outside of work, so going through some of the material on OCW has been good for keeping me sharp and learning new things.
The biggest problem that I've found is that the quality varies wildly. Some courses, like the intro to algorithms course, have videos of all lectures, as well as MP3 versions, course notes, etc. I find these really helpful since I'm more of an audio learner than a video learner and do better with a lecture to watch.
Other courses are well fleshed out with PDFs and slideshows, which are still a great way to get information.
The problem is some courses have only one or two lectures out of the entire course available, or are missing key lectures.
I think that the OCW initiative is a great idea, and has been well implemented for some courses. I hope to see them get all of the courses up to par with the top quality ones.

Other Universities doing this as well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Utah State University [usu.edu]* also has open courseware as well as COSL [usu.edu] (The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning), which is doing a lot to making the creation, remixing, and collaboration between open courses better. It also hosts the OpenEd conference. [usu.edu]

*Disclaimer: I am a student at Utah State University

Open Source Testing ?

[LM741N]

I would love to have MIT's course material available to study, but I know that if my feet aren't held to the fire, I tend to slack off. It would be cool for groups of people to get together to test one another as well on the material. Kind of Open Source Testing for lack of a better set of words. I also know that I get more self confidence and more of a sense of accomplishment when I do well on tests.

Re:Don't miss the best part: remixing

[zotz]

"Fortunately OCW is not simply free, but (at least partly) licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing non commercial sharing and remixing (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 [creativecommons.org])."

And the NonCommercial option makes this gratis but not libre and introduces a large can or worms.

Does anyone know why the institution that has the MIT License named after it felt the need to use a NonCommercial license?

For instance, if I understand what I have read over at the creative commons mailing lists correctly, no for profit company can "deal" in any of these materials for any reason whatsoever.

all the best,

drew

Re:Open Source Testing ?

[John Miles]

That would rock, all right... it'd be great to see a popular community site for self-study participants. It'd be more like a natural extension of the OSS developer-support process. Instead of explaining how to use API function X or feature Y, you'd see people answering questions about lecture points and even swapping exams for grading. (The idea of being accountable to someone else, even an anonymous study partner 2,000 miles away, would be a great motivator for many people.)

Re:Other Free Courses/courseware?

[rnjn,sinha]

ArsDigita University http://www.aduni.org/ [aduni.org] has good material on Computer Science. They only charge for the DVDs.

Re:HP != MIT

[tlhIngan]

While it does mean spending money, there's nothing stopping you from buying the books, though the prices on them can be... significant. For Single Variable Calculus (the first math course listed), the book used is Calculus with Analytic Geometry , which seems to go for about $150 new no matter where you look. The book is also used in Multivariable Calculus and Principles of Aeronautic Control, so at least it can be spread out a bit.

I heard there's a place you can walk into that has rows and rows of shelves filled with books. People seem to take the books off the shelf, take them to the front counter, and then go away with said books - for free! Perhaps you may have heard of such a place - I think they're called libraries.

One common trick people do is borrow the text, and photocopy what they need. Or the more adventurous among us photocopy the entire book at 1/3rd the cost... Or you can borrow, and keep renewing it until you're done.

Re:Don't miss the best part: remixing

[chriss]

It seems humans at a certain level are inherently lazy.

Don't think of is as lazy. Think of it as more economic in the short term.

Pleasure and avoiding unpleasant situations are major forces of motivation, and this actually makes sense evolutionary. Having sex not only is fun, but also prevents extinction, eating makes you feel good and prevents starving. Heating and air conditioning keep your environment in a temperature range not only comfortable, but also minimize the chance of freezing or endangering overstressing your heart. Watching TV gives more immediate pleasure than studying quantum physics. Small children usually act based on these economics.

But "learning quantum physics is more rewarding in the long run", so shouldn't you do it anyway? And one of the things that happens during socialization/growing up is learning to postpone pleasure. One nifty trick is to project your pleasure onto something else. A lot of people get kicks of doing a good jobs. If you play video games you are rewarded by points, which completely lack any positive physical feedback, but you have learned to feel good about them.

Now all this happens unconsciously. Someone who is very self disciplined has somehow found ways to gain his/her rewards in the process, so s/he can keep up motivation even through boring tasks. Unfortunately these peoples are often not aware that they are basically tricking themselves and so they flood everybody else with useless tips (the "just do it" kind), usually making it worse, because they cannot really explain what they do to stay motivated, make something difficult look very easy and thereby frustrate the other ones who fail because they believed the simplified version.

The problem is ways more complex and one of the big failures of our educational system is that it assumes that people act based mainly on logic, not that logic only works if it is synced with the basically hormonally run brain. To know is not necessarily to act. I have no short answer to how to change that and only an incomplete long answer. But a start is to forget about lazy and acknowledge that you choose anything for a reason, even if that reason is not what you would superficially consider logical. If you want your brain to do something, you have to offer it some reward now, not in two years. Lots of possible tricks, e.g. visualize your goal in the brightest colors for 20 minutes everyday before you start working. Might work for some people.

I believe that understanding how we learn and are motivated would lead to a leap in human evolution, but we are at the very beginnings. Add some decades for advancing neurology research here.

Re:HP != MIT

[H3g3m0n]

Nobody in any of my classes buys the textbooks (other than the $7AUD printed notes), my OOP lecturer asked how many people had actually brought the book and only around 2 in a class of 50 had. Maybe its because I'm doing computer stuff and just about everything is available on line on Wikipedia or 1000's of other tutorial sites, compared to a paperback book thats less than 300 pages long and costs around $100AUD, also for most of it the printed lecture notes are generally enough. Not sure how it is with non CS courses.

What really helps: study groups. Who's in?

[KWTm]

In addition to imposing self-discipline, a university class also puts you in touch with like-minded people who are also taking the class, so that classmates can benefit from each other's insight. There's a lot more motivation to learn when there is peer pressure just to be there physically in the classroom, if not actually contribute to the discussion --not to mention the non-peer pressure aspects such as actually learning from classmates' questions and the answers to them.

If I had to name one particular component of university courses that distinguishes them from self-learning by sheer willpower and time spent at the library/bookstore, it would be: having a real-time setting where I see other class members ask questions and have them answered. Thus, those new-fangled "distance learning" university courses aren't "real" courses if it's just one-on-one chats with professors, even if it's a real-time video chat (or even personal one-on-one tutoring); I'd rather have IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and give up the video if it means I can interact with fellow classmates in a group setting.

Which naturally leads us to the next question: who's interested in getting together to attend one of these courses? Slashdot is a global geek community, and here is where we would probably find potential fellow classmates who want to form a group of two to six and go through some of the coursework together. But you can't exactly just post a story about "Ask Slashdot: So-and-so says, who wants to take the Linear Algebra course with me?" every time you find an interesting course. Would be nice if we had a forum where we could do exactly that.

Anyone have any suggestions? Any particular web site? Yahoo!(tm) groups --maybe a group called "OpenCourseWare"? MySpace web page? I haven't experimented with my Slashdot journal --can anyone post entries? If so, could I start a journal entry called "Who's Looking For Fellow OpenClassmates"? Meanwhile, just to have some starting point, I'll volunteer my email address for those interested:

"[e-mail]" except replace the top level domain with .net, not .gov (try that on for size, spam-harvester-bot!)

We've had at least two Slashdot stories about specific MIT OCW courses (not including this one, which I agree is non-news): an earlier one about a course on basic cryptography, and a more recent course about copyrights. Let's see if we can organize something.

Incidentally, I suspect self-learning of languages is more common than you make it seem. I crammed Spanish for the month before a little expedition to Latin America. If you count "computer languages" as languages, then I suspect the majority of /.ers have done self-learning of languages to a useful level of proficiency.

Thanks, best reply I have read ....

[OldHawk777]

I consider MIT OCW as a professor/teacher class instruction resource/content. I don't think the OCW project ever intended to replace academic book publishers or provide multimedia video sessions of a class day. OCW provides other professors/teachers around the world a new resource for course/class instruction/content development for conversion to other cultures, languages, and countries.

Institutions like MIT, CalTech, Stanford, and Berkeley have never appeared (or proved, as best I know) to be as egotistical as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have in the past. OCW, FSF, GPL, OKI, PKI ... are a few examples of MIT and the State of Massachusetts providing and producing leaders in science and technology that are actively responsible to US democracy, capitalism, society, and humanity.

PLEASE NOTE: I am a high-school dropout, I do not have a college degree, I grew up in Alabama, I was in the USMC at 17yo. The comments above are what I know to be accurate and based on my knowledge, experience, and much personal reading (Whitehead, Frege, Hume, Sartre ...) and study. They could be wrong, but it -ain't- likely. This comment provides perspective on future modes of education using the many exceptional learning resources provided on the Internet, and in Avatar Populated Experience Simulations (APES) of future Learning Environments ....

Oh, I have taken a few college courses ... I have some (far past) experience with numerical coefficients, covariate analysis ... and I do know something about the Peloponnesian wars, A.N. Whitehead, Paolo Uccelo, William Aiken Walker, Maxfield Parrish .... My learning was not a failure, but education was lacking something. MIT and OCW folks THANKS, the future will be better, and learning is for some folks personal, but education will always be public or plutocratic. With public libraries, pubs, university book stores, and the Internet anyone can learn their own way, at their own pace, at any time any subject of interest. The future looks bright for many high school dropouts with curiosity and beer-pub discussions. Also, If you are a professor that would use the labels weird, fluke, pseudo-intellectual ..., then I would present that your subjective judgment is on you, not me or others.

DAMN, again I have traversed off topic ... !HAVEFUN!

There are sources of open content textbooks

[genick]

You can see two nice textbooks at www.potto.org Fundamentals of Compressible Flow and Fundamentals of Die Casting Design