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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 $100M over 10 years) and the key drivers behind it. So start reading up!"
Where was this when I went to college?
I had to settle for CUNY instead.
becuse they are saying that its not the meterials that you are shelling out many K's for, its the teachers who explain it. A few other schools have been doing this for a while, St. Thomas Aquanis school (though I could be wrong, but I know a school like this exists) has had their entire 4 year ciriculam based on the Birtainca Great Book Series for a while. Any one can pick up a set for about 200$, but the other 28,800$ a year is for the teachers to explain it.
I supose this would be interesting if I'm interested in a certen subject and want a bibliogaphy or some slids on it, but only an idot would try to get a real education by only reading the course meterial
Sleep is for the weak!
Yes it was. And it's no big deal. It's just the course outline, not the education, not the interaction between the student and profesor, not the heated lively debates, which is what constitutes good education.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Actually, it may be interesting to find out how many "prominent" intellectuals over the next 10 years gather much of their knowledge from this instead of actually going to school.
Many of the smart people I know found school was not for them and ended up learning what they know on their own. Also, that 12 year old prodigy down the block may not have $100 or more for college level coursebooks, but he sure has internet access...
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MIT OpenCourseWare. I love to learn and if this pans out it could be a real boon to self educated people around the world!
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I think you are right. Without the paper it is not equivalent. However, it is a great advantage for those who just want to supplement their existing knowledge or those who are trying to keep up with new developments in a given field. I think its great for that.
I still think employers would look upon this in a positive way. I know people who graduate putting all kinds of crap on the resume that they never really did or don't really know anything about. I guess they don't get called on it much because I haven't heard many horror stories.
Just my 2 cents.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
MIT is careful to point out that the OpenCourseWare project is not a distance-learning initiative. Indeed, according to Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering who served on the committee that developed the idea, OpenCourseWare represents a repudiation of distance learning. "It's a large effort at MIT that says, 'We're not going to do distance education,'" says Abelson. "It really is making a statement about what the university is about and what it's not about."
Also, the government isn't paying for this, since MIT is private.
I am amazed that you think that professions that don't need lab environments don't need campus based training. Would you want to pursue a history/English/law/religion degree without spending actual classroom time with your teacher and fellow students?
I took advantage of the fact that for many of the university courses I took were on-line. Not only were all the course materials on-line, but the lectures were too. So I would often sleep in and then catch class on my Mac Performa while eating lunch. Guess what? I really regret doing that. I wish I could go back and kick myself in the head and make myself go to class. I did fine in my classes but I missed out on lots of interaction, and the ability to ask a question in lecture.
Besides, Prof. Nick Parlante would always wear plaid to screw with the video compression. :)
Lasers Controlled Games!
Assuming that you read the material and, most importantly, actually understand it and can utilise the knowledge, then I don't see why it can't count.
When I interview people, I certainly look to see if they have a degree, but frankly, as long as they have the right attitude (the dominating factor really), and can answer the majority of my technical questions, then they have an excellent chance of getting employed.
If reading the online material from MIT lets you answer my technical questions, well then that's good enough for me.
MIT's stuff is really cool by virtue of its name. MIT is respected, well known, etc. All the course materials are also a great store of knowledge. But...
I've been working on a community educational system called Oomind. The great thing about oomind is that people are not just passive recipients of knowledge. You can also contribute your knowledge, and evaluate the quality of others' contributions. And, you can answer quiz questions to develop an academic record which is cumulative rather than percentage based.
You can find more about the philosophy of Oomind, and an introduction to how Oomind works. The basic idea is that educational material is in the form of courselets. These courselets have scores in ten different attributes including practicality, creativity, and beauty. The scores are based on a weighted average of user's evaluations of the courselet. These scores help in two ways: searching for information, and determining dynamically the academic value of the knowledge. Each courselet can have quiz questions submitted by any user. The questions also have a weight based on users' evaluations. When you answer a question correctly, the weight is used to add a percentage of the courselet's attribute scores to your academic record as a learner.
Anyway, it is very dynamic, but it is still new so there isn't too much content. Please join up and submit courselets!!!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Yes you may be able to find the information you need on Google, but this will almost always be data in isolation. MIT will leverage the fact that all of the data is contained within one logical system in order to enhance cross referencing, indexing, searching and metadata generation. Done correctly it will be a truly cohesive, intelligent library. I contend that we have only scaped the surface of what can be achieved with the web in terms of information management and I suspect the MIT project is also interested in advacning the state of the art.
This is because the american university system is closer to school. The German system is to have the professor go to the board or slide projector and to give his performance for 90 minutes. This is usually an one man show, with very few questions from the audience. School is IMHO, wenn the professor cares about the individual progress of the students and asks them questions etc.
The places where you learn are the small exercise groups and in contact with other students.
Today I study computer science next to my job at a distance university and wish I had the same material when I studied physics at a traditional university. That stuff is better and it saves you time, except you are one of those few persons who are actually able to learn at the speed the professor gives his talk (I'm not, I need usually twice the time :-)
I am amazed that you think that professions that don't need lab environments don't need campus based training. Would you want to pursue a history/English/law/religion degree without spending actual classroom time with your teacher and fellow students?
Well I signed up for the hardware lab this year and it is done this way: They send you a complete computer with interfaces, software etc home and you have 8x2 weeks time to get used to it and do homework with it. Later, if you solved the assignments, you have to go to one the locations where they offer examination and write a test. If you pass you are allwed to do a one week full time lab at the university location.
The funny thing that you meet your peer students personally just at the examinations or these labs in person, otherwise e-mail, news or irc is the means for contact, or individual arranged meetings among the students that live not too far away.
Regards, Marc
Students at other universities worldwide can use it as an additional reference. Those of us (sniff sniff) who have graduated and are working can look up that algorithm or data structure that we don't quite remember accurately (probably because of the hangover from the night before).
Not that I can throw away all my textbooks, but this is pretty sweet.
Oh, and as for job eligibility, again it's not about the degree...everyone that can afford to go to college should, just because of the enriching atmosphere and the chance to meet smart girls^H^H^H^H^H people.
"Older stuff" seems to be somewhat broken, although it is inconsistent. From what I can tell, Slashdot seems to switch to static pages every once in a while (comment posting is disabled, users appear logged out, etc.) for about 10-20 minutes at a time.
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. Whilst this isn't the American way, we Europeans kind of dig its naive
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. In fact, the UK govt. has just proposed a "graduate tax" for exactly this purpose.
(Oh, and Cato Institute reports attacking government spending are not exactly impartial sources)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.*
Except, I've a number of classes where the textbooks were strictly optional. Why? Because the professor thought they only provided good background information. Or, the textbook only supplied a convenient reference... all the "real" learning was based upon the lecture. There are numerous reasons this could happen - here are just a few:
1) There aren't any appropriate textbooks. For example, I took "Linux Kernel Interals". It was all hands on, looking at the code. All the lectures were based upon the professor's and students' personal knowledge. Or how about "Computer Architecture", where our studies were based on architecture principles realized in the PDP-8? (A machine with a decent architecture without being too complex to completely understand.) The only thing available was the lecture notes (which have subsequently been published in textbook form, I believe).
2) It's a topics/research class. You don't find many textbooks for "Current Topics in MiddleWare". Or in "Current trends in Organo-Metallic Chemistry Research", if you want to leave the computer science field. Sure, you can reference some of the appropriate journal articles, but they won't don't give you the comprehensive view and insights that lecture notes give.
3) It's a subjective field. How about all those humanities classes? (I'm sure even MIT students have to take a few of these.) Sure, you can list the "Norton Anthology of American Poetry" as a text book, but that by itself won't give you any insight into the cultural and historical forces that shaped a given poem. And it certainly won't help you when the test asks you to expound upon how the author makes an emotional connection with the reader through his careful selection of language.
I think I've expressed my point. I've usually found lecture notes to be infinitely more valuable than some textbooks. I will admit that there is occasionally a textbook that beats out the lecture notes, but usually that's been because of a lousy lecturer. There's a lot more worth here than you are giving MIT credit for.
Acutally, it is your logic that is flawed.
But if society benefits by educating its members,
The main flaw in this argument is that the "what's good for society" is *highly* subjective. Many people argue that the War on (Some) Drugs is "good for society," when there is a huge, massive pile of evidence that it does much more harm to individuals than it does good.
Who defines what is "good for society"? I claim that "that which is good for society" and "that which is moral" are almost exactly equivalent. The difference lies in that the former implies groupthink while the latter implies individual thought. And "moral" is also a highly subjective definition.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
You can get all of the courses from ArsDigita University online now. This was a one-year program based loosely on MIT's undergraduate computer science curriculum. It's got Real (unfortunately) video of all the lectures, problem sets and solutions. Pick a course, do them all in order. They're really quite good.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Rick Greenblatt and the TMRC hackers would be proud!!