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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 $100M over 10 years) and the key drivers behind it. So start reading up!"
It is wonderful that a motivated person could actually learn high-quality usefull stuff ( I assume ), but will it count with any potential employers ? It is very difficult to break through the "paper culture" which exists to support the requirement of expen$ive educations. No matter how clever one might be - as demonstrated by actual past performance, there is always that suspicion of anyone undocumented as a fraud.
enough is too much
This is a nice effort, but I don't know where they come up with the $100 million price tag. Most of the work is already done by professors who want to save themselves the hassle of making sure students get all of the handouts, problem sets, answers, etc. MIT doesn't block access to that stuff now and I guess they won't in the future.
My guess is the $100 million figure was dreamed up to shake some cash out of alumni. They're probably hoping that someone will come forward and endow the effort. Perhaps they're targeting Michael Saylor, the MIT graduate who once talked about starting a free university with the cash he was making from MicroStrategy. The dot bomb crash has slowed that dream and perhaps MIT's as well.
Of course, I don't mean to denigrate the entire idea. It just seems like they're taking credit for something they already do. Did I mention that each week, I take out the trash? That's keeping the world cleaner! Call me Mr. Environmentalist!
I'm finishing my degree from the University of Maryland right now, and I see this as a great potential for supplemental information for my coursework. I take a large majority of my classes over the Web so I can work full-time in addition to taking 12-15 credits a semester. Despite the extreme convience of taking my courses on-line, I feel as though I don't recieve as comprehensive instruction as I did in the classroom. These course materials, while certainly not identical, could certainly provide me with another point of view, and quite possibly giving me a better grasp of the material.
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
I find it a little bit disconcerting that I, as an MIT student, am paying tuition to help devalue the very education that I am paying for. The cost will ultimately fall on me to make these materials available to everyone else.
Hey, it could be worse, you're paying a premium to attend a quality university *and* to share knowledge with the rest of the world helping inch us closer to Utopia.
I'm at Michigan State where tax money and students tuition are paying a premium to provide a Big Ten athletics program.
I think I'd rather be improving the world.
If it WERE the same thing, then putting this information out there would instantly put MIT out of business.
I once saw a bumper sticker that said "A University needs a football program as much as a fish needs a bicycle." That says it all. I honestly don't have references to back this up, but as far as I know most athletic programs *lose* money for the school (I'm certain at UNR, where I attend, they do) but nonetheless they give a name for the school that helps attracts quality professors. At least one would hope.
Places like MIT, Caltech, and Harvard are the few places with incredible academic programs but virtually nonexistant athletic programs (the popular stuff I mean, that makes it to ESPN) that can charge large sums of money because the education itself is so good. How many times do you hear about a company spinning off of an MIT research program. Meanwhile, UNLV had an incredible basketball program which most likely attracted students and professors to the school. However, last I check, the Computer Science program isn't even Accredited there!
I thought I had a point somewhere in there...
Cheers,
jw
"Has anything you've done made your life better?" - American History X
Pick a subject that you are interested in. Something like a foreign language, art history, anthropology, topology, operating system design; anything that you are interested in but don't know much about. Get a good textbook on the subject. Commit to reading the text, working the examples, and solving the exercises in it.
How long would you last in doing that? When would you lose interest? When would other, more pressing issues, take priority and push your self study aside?
Having all of the courses on line is a nice idea. However, without the pressure of deadlines, grades, and competition, most people would have a hard time following such self study through to completion.
The middle mind speaks!
Its not just about setting up a web site - its the cost of migrating the practices of an entire institution around a new model of information dispersal. This will definitely erode the value of journals as graduate work starts filtering in to the system.
MIT may even be attempting somehting more daunting by trying to productize the process to be sold to other institutions, I'm not sure, but that would raise costs even higher.
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.
No such thing as a "free education", or free healthcare for that matter. It's all paid for through taxation. Which simply means that those who don't study have no option but to subsidize those who do.
It's all about control. Will the Swedish government (taxpayer) pay for your education at a university that isn't an "approved" part of their system? Of course not... but your 4 years of tuition fees in the US will get you the best education money can buy, anywhere in the world.
When you graduate, you pay the taxes, and you lose control over your future. I mean that quite literally, for example the state-run pension systems throughout Europe are heading for bankruptcy.
European governments are living on borrowed time, just as the dotcom firms were during the bubble, spending money freely without thinking of the future. I will make very sure to move my assets out of Europe and into a "free" (as in speech, not as in beer) economy before the EU governments realise that their vote-winning health, education and pension schemes, or should I say scams, are actually built on sand.
At that time, the American system of "pay for what you actually use" will be proved to be the only sustainable model.
As an MIT alum, I'm disappointed that you have not realized the true value of the MIT education.
;)
Anyone can buy the textbooks for any MIT class. Anyone halfway gifted with Google could get the lecture notes, problem sets, and exam solutions to just about any class since about 1995. Think of those things as the things you get for free as a student.
What you pay for is the opportunity to interact with brilliant minds like yourself (and some undoubtedly more brilliant). Don't believe me? Go to one of Noam Chomsky's lectures on American foreign policy and get in a debate with him. Or head to LCS and have a chat with Ron Rivest. Go to MAS.100 and talk with Michael Hawley (does he still teach that?) after class. That's just a few examples. You can certainly find others interested in whatever you are interested in. And that's just the professors. Don't neglect the opportunity to learn from your fellow students.
Your tuition is only wasted if you waste it. MIT is more than just going to class and reading some books and lecture notes.
or luddite, but. . .
It isn't exactly as if the course materials or curricumlum at MIT, or any *other* college, is some sort of great secret.
Nor is the actual *course material* really going to be online. That will be found in the textbooks.
If you want to learn physics or how to read the Iliad in the original greek all you need do is make the trip to your local public library, and in some states any state funded college library is also considered a public library, and take out a relevant text.
And read it.
Without trying to appear *too* snide, anyone who can't figure this out probably isn't up to college grade work in the first place.
The possibility of having lecture notes available online is an interesting exercise, but I'm not sure of what general relevance or use it might be. The textbook always contains superiour information, that is why they USE textbooks after all, and lecture notes are, in fact, often useless without the text and only needed to make sure you might have some niggling little tidbit that * that professor, in THAT course, is likely to sneak into a TEST.*
All in all I see how this might prove useful to the less actually educationally ambitious student of MIT, and how it might prove *interesting* to some of the public, but I fail to see how it in any way AIDS the public in an educational sense. The material is already available to the public, (including the course curiculum of MIT which is published and stocked by public libraries already), in the superiour form of actual texts.
MIT is correct. They can publish this material freely because 1) The essential information is *already* free and public, and 2) Because you don't pay MIT to reveal to you that F=MA, you pay them to have a professor *explain it to you.* and then be able to say you earned a degree from MIT!
If all you want is access to the learning material so that you may educate yourself at little or no expense you likely have a vastly superior resource right in your own community.
It's called a "reference librarian."
Go introduce yourself.
KFG
Being that most (if not all) universities in America are nonprofits, they suck a great deal of taxes from the government (hence the people) and for this priveledge the Universities gather an immense amount of cash reserves farming out their professors and staff for cash to bussiness and gov't and charging exhorbitant fees for the "honor" to attend a few lectures.
What I find remarkable here isn't the fact that the info will be free (Mellon et. al. are picking up the early tab) but that it even exists at all. See, one of the scams of education is it's vaporous nature. Having to prepare lecture outlines is one thing, to actually solidify a course's material in almost linear form via a web page has to be remarkable. How many courses, especially the humanities, do you remember as a bullshit waste of time because it was virtually a free for all class discussion or the professor (while well intentioned) was just a very poor professor? This shows, if it comes to fruition, a great deal of courage on MIT's part and proves that they aren't the con artists many Universities are.
I modded your post to insightful after i saw somebody set it to "troll", because it makes me mad when i see moderators injecting their own politics into their mods.
But your garden-variety libertarian logic is flawed: the social security dilemma facing western europe and the US has really nothing to do with subsidized education, and everything to do with an aging work force. Read _Generational Accounting_ by lan J. Auerbach and Laurence J. Kotlikoff if you don't believe me.
And while I'm at it, leaving education to the private sector only makes sense if you believe there are NO external societal benefits to be gained from having an educated populace.
But if society benefits by educating its members, ie people commit less crime and practice healthier lifestyles, then the government has a perfectly logical reason to subsidize education. The market system will fail to provide the pareto optimal level.
Your move.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
So let's just consider going to the local library and finding an available copy of last year's 'Markov Chains and Simulated Neuro-physiology' textbook just right out, shall we?? What we really need is some kind of system that can transmit large quantities of text and pictures to each interested student's workspace, without reducing the supply for anyone else. Gee, I wonder what we could use....
Oh, right, I forgot. Except for those literally thousands of errors I have found in textbooks over the course of my life. So errata must come with each; distributing such and updating such is difficult if it has to come with the physical book -- I suppose you would need the above hypothetical information transport system, tying the errata to the book, in some kind of 'web'.And as I said above, frequently there are no books. Or the books suck, which is an even more common situation. Or school politics fucks up book choice, so the prof is xeroxing and distributing portions of other books, making his own compiliation for the class as it goes along. Or somehow, the prof deigns to think himself talented enough to explain material better, to his focused group, than a general textbook -- perish the thought!
Okay, cockmonger, let me put it for you straight. The material, at least not all of it, is not available to the public. This missing material, the real deal, the reason people pay 5 or 6 digits for 4 years of it, is the community of learning that supports peoples' interest and efforts. This community is the one thing that the ACES project is trying to duplicate that makes it different from the rest of the 'put notes on the web' projects the world over. Go read the article, join the community, add your ideas to the source -- it's GPLed.So in closing, I should thank you for pushing the declining cause of public libraries. They need more support and funding, and always have. But there is so much more to a college course, and to a college environment, that you are missing. Take another look.
>but only an idot would try to get a real education by only reading the course meterial
There was (and all too often, still is) the time that the only way to be informed was to teach it to yourself. I know that because that's how I learned computers! I was the only person on my block (actually, within most of the school) for over a decade that could do anything with a computer. 100% self taught from books. Now I help others use computers.
The problem with learning by being taught is that you only learn what the teacher has to tell you. And unless your teach has a photographic memory, that means you end up with less of an education. I always tell anyone I help who wants to fully comprehend the subject to read books on it. I make mistakes even when I teach people how to do things. I don't think that makes me a bad teacher -- I think it just proves I'm still learning how to do my job.
I believe a "real" education comes neither by rote, nor by hearing example cited. It comes from trying, doing, and being. You lean the "real" answer by correcting your mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you aren't learning difficult enough subject matter.
Just my two cents.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Correct. Many of us do not believe this to be a bad thing, since a reasonable, progressive taxation system results in the rich subsidising the poor.
"Reasonable"? Reasonable to whom? I assume it's reasonable to the "poor" you mention since they get to plunder the coffers of the "rich." How reasonable is it that the harder you work, the more you are penalized?
Not necessarily. What it should mean (modulo tax cuts for the rich, and the myth of trickle-down economics) is that this generation of students are subsidised by the previous generation of students, since they're now earning more than their "non-graduate" contemporaries.
Many students here take out loans to finance their education, and then pay back the loan when they graduate and get a job. This way, students are responsible for their own education, which is the way it should be.
Oh, and Cato Institute reports attacking government spending are not exactly impartial sources
And Tom Daschle isn't impartial, either. So what? You'd expect a person who is arguing their position to be partial to that position, wouldn't you? Impartiality is not important in this regard. What is important is whether or not the facts stated by the Cato institute are true, and wheter or not the reason they employ is valid. I notice that you chose to assail neither of those things.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.