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.

Re:Great!!

[neuroticia]

I agree, it's great that schools are putting courses online and offering them for free to the public.

However, let's not lose sight that Education is a business and not a right. The universities that do not put their materials online have their reasons to not put their materials online. They believe that they're giving away something that others are paying for, etc. (Along with the fact that it is rather time consuming to put things online most times.)

That said, as someone who often takes exams and reads assignments online, I love the concept of Opencourseware and wish more Universities and schools would consider following the path. Perhaps if they were educated about the implications of opencourseware-- that it wouldn't take students away from the school as they would still want to attend for other reasons (diploma, social life, interaction with their peers and professors, etc.) then more schools would consider it. They could make use of volunteers to enter the information into a database, lobby for tax cuts for "donating" knowledge to the public, and so on.

-Sara

Re:Great!!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

However, let's not lose sight that Education is a business and not a right.

Actually, there's a pretty strong argument that education is a right, and that while it certainly can be run as a business, it shouldn't be. A friend of mine who is, ironically, the chairman of the Economics department at a rather conservative college, has a stock rant about how the business mindset is a cancer which has metastasized from business per se into other areas of American life where it doesn't belong, like politics, religion, the military, health care, and -- ta da! -- academia. I think his view is a bit on the gloomy side (hey, they don't call it the "dismal science" for nothing) but I tend to agree with his core idea: that business is business, and everything else isn't business, and that trying to run non-business institution like schools as businesses is bad for the core mission of the institution, which in this case is education.

All that being said: yes, schools have to get money from somewhere, especially private schools (is MIT private?) It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable for them not to give away on the Web everything they provide to tuition-paying students. But a school whose primary goal is making money is not an educational institution worth anyone's time, no matter how prestigious its name.

Project Athena Rev. 2

[maggard]

So in short it's Project Athena Rev. 2.

Last time it was Unix-based, developed X Windows for an interface, and was offered out for license by other institutions.

This time it's some interpretation of the idea "Open" (MIT-style which is usually pretty good) and now with infrastructure widely available they're concentrating just on syllabi & courseware.

Nice how they've delineated what MIT-as-an-educational-experience-offers and how that's different from using their materials; that giving the latter away doesn't devalue the former.

Re:Project Athena Rev. 2

[neuroticia]

"giving away the latter doesn't devalue the former"-- So true. Course materials are a small part of the experience of going to a good school. If anything, experiencing the course materials would only increase my desire to go to the school and interact with the professors teaching the courses. (This is assuming that the course material is appealing. If it's not, then it would weed out the people who were disinterested and likely to be poor performers in the first place.)

It's like being allowed to use the world's fastest computer. You might be recieving most of the benefits of owning it-- but you still want to own it. You still want to be able to overclock it or modify the case... Or even set up the OS the way you like it.

-Sara

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).

Re:Knowledge can be a prodct

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowledge alone isn't a terribly useful commodity- it takes hard work and a certain degree of talent to turn knowledge into a set of useful skills and the ability to think critically.

The "knowledge" that MIT is making publicly available has always been available to those taking the time to acquire it- all MIT is now doing it showing how certain professors package this information up to present to their students.

When you go to a prestigious university, you are not paying for the trade secrets of how the world operates- you are paying for the opportunity to interact with and learn from professors who are at the cutting edge of their fields- the feedback and encouragement that these people can provide to a motivated student simply cannot be bound up in a book or presented on the web.

By now I have spent an unusually long period stuggling to complete an undergraduate degree at MIT. Do I still feel that the experince is worth it now that they will be giving away all this information that I have struggled so hard to acquire? Absolutely. All my neatly bound course notes wouldn't be worth anything had I not gone through the process of actually learning the material. For me, that process could only have occurred in an academic environment.

Google is helpful

[NerdSlayer]

Ever want to take the infamous 15-412 Operating Systems class at CMU? Type 15-412 into google and you can get the homepage:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~412/index.html

full of lectures, notes, homework, exams and projects.

How many of you have ever written your own shell from scratch? Maybe now's your chance. Or better yet, read up the kernel project:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~412/applications/projec ts /proj3/

Open Courseware Link

[DeadBugs]

Here is a direct link to The MIT Open Courseware Program