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More on MIT OpenCourseWare
lewiz writes "Over at BBC News they have an update on the MIT initiative to give away all course material for free over the Internet that we read about on Slashdot quite a while ago. The full story details how they are doing it in the hopes that other Universities will follow suit. This seems an amazing thing considering the more recent moves toward pay-per-use services but definitely a good thing and I wish them the best of luck. The only question I see is whether or not this will help in the way of "official qualifications" - what if we know a large portion of a certain course... how do we go about proving it?"
Ars Digita founder Phillip Greenspun has been crusading for MIT to stop charging tuition for some time. I'm just amazed that his name is never brought up with this story, seeing as MIT finally seems to be doing what he has been trying to do for years, and in some small way perhaps moving toward being tuition-free...
@AlexSheive
All material for all the courses I follow at the moment are available on the web.
The reason is I am now a postgraduate student and no books exists that cover the kind of recent research material that we need to learn. Instead we use research articles, and they are always published on the net nowadays.
For the pregraduate studies the dilema is the same, except you have to buy the books at the local bookstore. You can still end up with knowledge without proof.
So how to prove what you know?
Just remember to enroll for the exam!
Oh! so universities are not free in your country?
Well, that is a completely different issue.
Well, as a teacher myself (lecturer or assistant professor depending on your equivalences, on optical telecommunications), I see a few issues with this:
- You can't really ask questions, especially on adjacent topics: it is not the same to send an email to someone you don't know, as to walk up to the teacher at the end of a lecture.
- In the maze of information a Google search yields, it is difficult to get the fundamentals as well as to separate the wheat from the chaff; in fact, you have to already know enough about the topic to get to and understand relevant information. Or ask further references to someone who knows.
- When learning on-line, do you really do the exercises? Yet often you don't really understand what is going on until you practice, programming being a prime example of this. More generally, it is easy to think you understand something - see all the self-taught webmasters who think HTML tag soup is a text formatting tool and is correct as long as IE interprets it...
Funny, BTW, we had a small debate a few months ago on whether to put our course material on-line. The consensus seemed to be that we should, except for some marketing types who wanted to make people pay for the service or something like that, and those who wanted a control process for letting out only the good. The comments above were pointed out in the process - some by the students themselves IIRC.That was at Brown, not MIT.
Did you go to a private school? At the community college in California where I teach, the cost is $11 per unit. If you transfer to a Cal State or UC after that, you're still only paying a tiny percentage of the cost of your own education -- the taxpayers pay the rest.
BTW, what about lab courses? What about the gymnasium? The library? Research? All that stuff costs money too.
Why can't a professor just video tape the damn lesson and catalogue the class participation? After a few years, I'd assume that there would be a complete class as well as the entire set of questions/clarification that could possibly be asked.
This makes sense if you had a lot of really horrible teachers who used lecturing as a method of instruction. Lecturing is a ridiculous custom left over from the middle ages, when books were so expensive that students couldn't afford their own copies, so the profs read them out loud, and the students transcribed them.
The big problem with lecturing is that it's passive. To make the classroom experience worthwhile, you need something active, like students discussing stuff with each other, doing worksheets and getting help from the teacher, etc. None of this would work in a passive medium like video.
I also had a prof that made his own book. It'd be real cool if the gov't could create an "open" text book initiative. Books could be freely available online, while other profs could use them, modify them as long as the new version was also freely available.
I can't imagine why the government should get involved in this, but for free textbooks, see my sig. Is your prof's book available for free online? If so, I'd like to catalog it on my site.
Find free books.
There are a number of points which need to be made.
First, it takes time to plan out lectures to the extent that they are even worth recording for future generations of students. And time is one resource which most professors do not have. The way academia works today, most professors at major universities are largely occupied by their research activities. Teaching -- especially at the undergraduate level, and most especially at the lower level undergraduate level -- is typically viewed as a nuisance, or at best, a distratction from research. It is quite rare to find a set of lectures worth recording; more often than not, the lectures were prepared in a big hurry the night before or the morning of the lecture. The vast majority of lectures are simply not worth recording in any form.
That said, excellent class materials DO occasionally become available, though typically in print form (as you alluded to). Faculty teaching commonplace courses (for instance, Quantum Mechanics or Statistical Mechanics in physics) whose subject material does not vary much, will often go back to their old notes, polish them up a bit, and have another go at it in a few years. After a few iterations of this process, excellent course notes are often developed. In many cases, those notes find their way into one of those famous textbooks which you have grown to love (or hate!). A great example is the classic "Spacetime Physics" on special relativity, which included questions from actual students taking the first version of the class, along with authoritative answers from John Wheeler, who is one of the world's foremost thinkers on relativity theory, and also one of the best physics teachers who has ever lived.
There are several major implicit assumptions in your statement which I should address. Imagine, for instance, that Feynman, when writing his famed lectures, decided to make then "open". What we would have today, in addition to the original, pristine edition, would be a proliferation of umpteen different versions with comments, additions, and substractions made by other folks. Now, this may come as a shock to you, but the world of ideas is not a democracy. Some ideas are better than others; some thinkers better than others. I submit that Feynman's original version would be vastly superior to almost any modified one; hence, the proliferation of "open" texts, when the best texts by the world's foremost thinkers are already available, would do little good other than to confuse and obfuscate the beginning student. You need to critically examine your assumption that open source dogma is applicable to every conceivable circumstance.
Another huge fact you are missing out on, is that all those great textbooks by the world's greatest thinkers are already at your disposal for free (as in beer). All you need to do is go down to your public library, and check them out! Feynman, Knuth, Plato, Samuelson and others are at your fingertips. If your library does not have a book, just request it through interlibrary loan. This is, in fact, the best of all possible worlds. You really don't want to have to sort through umpteen diluted and distorted "open" versions of those texts.
As someone who grew up during a time when internet access was not commonly available, I find it amusing and alarming that many younger students seem to think they can find anything they wish on the web. Simple point of fact is, those of us who have sat down with the best texts, bugged our profs with questions, did the labs, and thought about things, came through with a much better understanding of basic sciences than those who scanned the web for some writeup by lord-knows-who at Buttfuck U. Again, the world of ideas is not a democracy.
Which brings me to another major assumption in your statement : that one can simply acquire the knowledge one needs by passively sitting back and watching a video or reading a book. In fact, the biggest factor in learning is doing. Working out homeworks. Doing labs. Asking questions in lecture and in sections. This is a really key fact that most beginning students really miss out on; even in introductory courses, there are many challenging concepts which most students fail to absorb. (For instance, how many of you who have taken a basic physic class can explain how a top precesses? Or PRECISELY how the twin paradox works?) Watching another student ask the same questionm may help to some extent, but you will then miss out on another crucial part of learning, which is learning how to ask the right questions. When you boil it all down, learning is essentially an active, participatory experience; you will learn much, much more by becoming actively engaged, rather than just sitting back on your couch and watching a video or reading a book. And you simply cannot do that without lecturers, labs, teaching assistants, and so on. That is why learning at all levels (kindergarten and up) is inevitably so expensive, if done properly.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.