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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!"
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!
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.
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
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.