Phil Long and Open Courseware

WebWord Usability writes: "The Technology Source is running an interview with Phil Long. It is mainly about open source software and open courseware development at MIT (e.g., Open Knowledge Initiative). If you're interested in this stuff, CREN will be streaming a discussion with Vijay Kumar and Phil Long on Thursday 7-March-2002 at 4PM EST. Still want to know more? Syllabus Magazine ran an article on OpenCourseWare in January 2002."

Comments

Great!!

[mochan_s]

This really great. In the last few years, a lot of course materials have been put online by professors (and not made you have to log in with you university account to access it, unlike some mean universities!!!)

MIT already has a course materials on the WWW page where they have links to the web-pages created by professors for their classes. And, a lot of them aren't just a class syllabus and problems numbers from the book, but exams, solutions, HW solutions and sometimes even class notes. It's neat browsing through those.

I guess this is just an extension of the idea so that all web-interface is the same for all classes. I just hope it doesn't end like other university web-site where 90% of the web-pages generated for classes are 90% the same and just contains the syllabus. Very frustrating browsing through 100 class links and they're all the same.

The "Open" university

[jsmyth]

I teach a final year Software Systems development course for one of the largest universities in the world, and the majority of the courseware we use is available online. The university is The Open University, the course is M301: Software Systems and their Development.

The course includes a number of aspects of development, including ethics (links from the main student website to other ethical institutions), project management, java, UML, and concurrency. Most of the materials are on that site, except of course for the two set books - a java book and a concurrency book.

The open philosophy of the Open University predates that of MIT, although has a lot in common with academia in general - that of a meritocracy where knowledge is shared, and the importance is placed on what you do with it and how you do it, rather than where you come from or what you look like.

I find the MIT angle to be very interesting, because they say they are not giving the "experience" or "education" away. This is true, and probably the only thing the OU lacks is regular face to face tuition. Having said that, I gave a tutorial just yesterday, and met my students for the first time this year, and we are in regular communication via email and webchat, so we are not losing that much!

I am very interested in seeing how MIT perform in terms of materials - because we in the OU don't have a large face-to-face component, the materials have to read very well, and I feel they do (check it out).