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

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: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.