Get a Free MIT Education

dhollm writes "Well, at least the course materials will be online, for free, for all. The article gives a brief description of the program (evidently costing MIT $100M over 10 years) and the key drivers behind it. So start reading up!"

Comments

MIT's got a site up on it.

[bziman]

OpenCourseware from MIT's Web site. They've got a mailing list, a link to the press release, and some other information.

I like it... I can't wait for the Linguistics curriculum to go up.

--brian

Re:Where is the $100M coming from?

[MaxwellStreet]

Actually, student tuition is probably the -last- place the money is going to come from.

MIT ranks right up there with Harvard and other Ivy League schools when it comes to endowments. Basically, alumni give the school lots of money, which gets reinvested in all sorts of things - including projects of strategic importance like this.

Interestingly, MIT also derives significant revenue from the pseudo-business ventures and inventions created there. Inventions that turn out to be revenue-generators, created on-campus using their facilities, must pay a percentage of those revenues right back to the school.

I remember this causing quite a flap with a guy whose last name was Bose - son of the guy of Bose audio fame - who had an invention and was fighting with MIT over these fees.

At big-name schools like MIT, and Ivy League schools, student tuition is just one tiny piece of the financial machine.

I feel sorry for you americans

[redhog]

cause here in Europe (at least in my country, which is Sweden), you don't have to pay for education. You pay for books (or lend them frome someone), and you pay for your apt and food, but not for your education as such. And there's a student loan with kinda nice repay-plan (at least partly based on your income) you can get for paying your rent and food. You don't need to be rich, only smart, to get a good education...

Re:I feel sorry for you americans

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? You don't have to pay for Oxford?

MIT isn't just some vocational school or junior/community college.

Link to previous slashdot story

[Jish]

As many of you realize this was mentioned before on slashdot. I found the old story (which was not so easy cause searching under slashdot's "older stuff" doesn't return any results for MIT???)

Anyway:

The other story

Check out some of the information/comments from that...

-- Josh

Positive, but not really new

[fm6]

The MIT initiative is a very positive thing, and is a refreshing response to the commercialism that has pervaded technical and scientific institutions for that last couple of decades.

But really, they're just formalising and advertising a process that is already well under way. Online course materials are already an important web resource. When I need to teach myself some algorithmic trick, I no longer search for some hard-to-find, hard-to-browse, hard-to-read textbook. I go to Google. If I choose my keywords properly, I'm sure to find somebody's carefully written, example-laden lecture notes, aimed at all the thick-headed freshmen who forgot to come to class.

God, I love the web. For all its flaws, it's an indispensible resource. I know I used to do technical research without it, but I'm damned if I can remember how.

Re:Old News

[jeff67]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/04/114122 8

Another MIT perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

This program will not be all that useful in the long run to end-users. At MIT, I have learned very little from the course material. Most of the learning comes from being exposed to the really cool professors and the other self-motivated learners on campus.

This is not to say that the program will be useless; the people who really benefit are professors at other institutions who are looking for innovative approaches to college level education. Because this is the primary benefit to a program like this, it will in no way replace an MIT education with a self-taught system.

(at lael (dot mit edu))
MIT Mechanical Engineering '03

Linkrot!!

[webword]

The link to the article on degree.net really sucks. Why? Linkrot. When people try to get to this information in the future, it probably won't be there because other news will come along to replace it.

The solution is to put the information on both the "news" page and the archive. That is something all web sites posting news should do. The user should then be responsible for finding the news article in the archive, as an individual page, so that it will last when people go back at a later time.

While degree.net does not have the MIT degree news in their archive right now, I hope they place it there soon. Better still would be an indvidual page dedicated to the MIT degree news, so that it could be directly linked, rather than using the news page or the archive.

Linkrot sucks. Understand what it is, and understand how to prevent it. If you are a webmaster or publisher, make it easy to find information and set up permanent URLs. To do otherwise is poor practice. And users, look for permanent URLs. Use them when you find them. Try to prevent spreading linkrot.

Thanks.

Stucture and Interpretation of Computer Programs

[aturley]

I found the page for the class on SICP, and lo and behold, THE WHOLE BOOK (well, it look like the whole book) is online at

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book .h tml

Mod me down if you already knew this. It came as a very pleasant surprise to me. For those who don't know, this book is considered by many to be part of the core of CS books, along with K&R, TAOCP, and the MIT Algorithms book.

andy

There's not much there there

[Animats]

Check out Course 16.160, Principles of Automatic Control, which is currently "online". The only real content is a short summary of what will be taught in each lecture. It's a good summary, in that it covers what the instructor considers important in control theory and how to use it to get work done. (It's possible to study control theory, prove theorems for a year, and not learn how to control anything. MIT doesn't make that mistake.) But there's only about five screens of real content for that course, excluding the problem sets.

There's a section where you're supposed to be able to see questions asked by students along with the answers, but it's empty.

All this seems great if you're a student at MIT, but it's not useful for others.