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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 $100M over 10 years) and the key drivers behind it. So start reading up!"
This was annouced about a year ago.
It is wonderful that a motivated person could actually learn high-quality usefull stuff ( I assume ), but will it count with any potential employers ? It is very difficult to break through the "paper culture" which exists to support the requirement of expen$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
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
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!
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 look for a reissue of the DVD "Updated for new technology" anytime now.
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...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
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.
Anyway:
The other story
Check out some of the information/comments from that...
-- Josh
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
Tom.
(Account 190939, having difficulty logging in)
Oh arse
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
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
k .h tml
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/boo
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
Life is life . . . everything else is just a stupid T-shirt slogan.
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.
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.
So shall we find a bridge over the Charles River, and measure it in CmdrTacos?
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
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...