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?"

Comments

Proving you know the material

[grayrest]

>how do we go about proving it?

Take the class, break the curve and insist everybody else is stupid for not knowing it. At least, that's how it works here at GaTech, MIT might be different.

Re:Proving you know the material

[ninjadoug]

Simple, You pay to take the exams.
As if you do course-work, pay to get it assessed and marked.

In Britain we have The Open University, (http://www.open.ac.uk) not quite the same thing but not far off

Re:Proving you know the material

[packeteer]

Basically what they are saying is this: "the education is free but the credit is not". Learn all you want but your still going to have to pay. Personally this will work well for me if i can do this when i grauate high school but i know plenty of other people that will never do anything but the bare minimum in a class. Most people in my classes in high school dont try to learn the subject material, they just learn the test answers.

Certification

[GigsVT]

what if we know a large portion of a certain course... how do we go about proving it?"

This is the thing. Colleges and universities are obselete. I think Brainbench had the right idea, just have many little certifications that make up the summary of your qualifications. What is the difference if someone learns something by reading online documents or by going to hear some windbag talk about it for 50 minutes? There isn't.

I think in the next 20 years we will see the demise of higher education as we know it. As older people that have obselete ideas about degrees meaning something die off, the new generation of managers that will value skills above sheepskins will come into power. Then we will see real reform in the education and training markets.

Higher education, as it exists now, is something like an organized religion, with plenty of dogma and rabid followers and supporters. I'm sure I will be flamed by those people shortly. I went to college, I did my four years, it was really pointless.... I couldn't recommend it to anyone with the intelligence to learn things on their own.

Re:Certification

[PDHoss]

This might be all fine and good for technology-oriented fields, but what about other disciplines? I don't want my kids taught by a teacher who can simply pass the cert. I'm not interested in having my spleen removed by the Johnny-come-lately who knows all the facts and figures but has no experience in doctor-patient relations. My attorney better have taken a few psych courses before he picks my jury.

You could well argue that it's "real world" experience, not a degree, that separates the shiny certs from the experienced [doctor|teacher|sysadmin|etc.]. But committing to a 4 year degree or similar program tells me, the customer/employer/whatever, that, at the very least, you've got the experience provided by a university and the sizable investment that suggests you'll likely stick it out.

PDHoss

Re:Certification

[dboyles]

I think Brainbench had the right idea, just have many little certifications that make up the summary of your qualifications.

I agree. There should be a way to divide fields into something called "subjects", and to become certified in each of these individual workshops ("courses"). Once a person ("student") becomes proficient in the basics of each of these "courses", he or she can move on to higher-level "courses" that provide a more in-depth explanation of the "material".

There will certainly need to be a way to evaluate these "students", so we'll assign them "grades". It would be nice to have some sort of record of this student, so we'll have a database called a "transcript" for each student.

Huzzah, a revolution in education!

In all seriousness, I think higher education deserves the respect that it gets. At the risk of sounding redundant, a certification does not equal knowledge, and a college education is much more than the sum of its parts. I've found that by going to class and making an attempt to be interested, I've become intrigued by fields that I otherwise probably would have avoided (like Statistics and Finance).

I realize college isn't for everybody (on either end of the spectrum), but to imply that a college student is in college because he is not intelligent enough to learn the material on his own is, well, wrong.

Re:Certification

[epukinsk]

What do you guys think?

As a decent web designer and fledgling software engineer, I think there's a big difference between web design and software engineering.

Erik

Re:Certification

[Raiford]

The error in this kind of thinking is that certification says nothing about whether a person knows how to think. A degree doesn't guarantee this either but it comes closer if the person has obtained a degree from a reputable institution in a engineering or science field. A college education is not about specific systems that you may learn about. It is more about learning fundamental concepts which you can apply to problems which require you to use synthetic knowledge.

Re:Certification

[ealar dlanvuli]

Certs are a scam from an era long gone, sorry. Has there ever been another career where you could get a well paying job for 3 hours of testing? Has there ever been a market whos cost of entry was a few months of tinkering? It was great while the public didn't know better, but when your 10 year old can do 90% of what the guy making 35k/yr at the hospital does, and he dosen't have any formal training, you start to wonder exactly what went wrong.

A person with a BS in CS or a similar subject (even a pure math major would be good) has twice as much chance of getting any position above "the IT tech that fixes our damn windows boxen" than someone with 5000 certs.

Re:Certification

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it depends on how you define "web designer" actually. If, by web designer you suggest one who more or less "draws" up a site in something like Fireworks or Dreamveaver and their ilk, I would say they have less than nothing in common with traditional software engineering. On the other hand, if your method of web design consists of actually creating an architecture of sorts for a web application, then I contend that the two are more or less the same task, embodying the same basic principles. I also contend that compared to a basic little GUI app, web development can be much more challenging as you are often in the position of not knowing how people will access your web app or details about the environment in which it will be used. Personally, I invest a great deal of time and planning in my web designs, dutifully seperating function from content, planning ahead for "upgrades", insuring web standards are met, and a lot of regression testing.

Re:Certification

[Turing Machine]

Problem is, with Brainbench and other testing groups online, you're not proving you KNOW the material--just that you're able to do a quick Google search.

As an employer, what difference would it make? If I can hire one guy who can get the answer in 5 minutes with a Google search, or another guy who can figure it out in a couple of days on his own, which one should I hire?

Being able to look up answers (and evaluate whether those answers are right, a tougher proposition) is a very valuable skill.

Four year degrees, not colleges, are obsolete

[Ars-Fartsica]

What people are now realizing is that one shot of education, taken right after high school, in a four-year package, is typically not suitable for the career and job changes that will eventually happen for most of us. You hear the term "lifelong learning" being thrown around now and it has a grain of validity. Many of us at some point will return to some type of educational institution for further coursework at some point, even if it is while we are working.

Colleges will still have a role. Many of them are adapting and offering more options to working individuals and other "part time" students. Many offer online courses. What colleges bring to the table is legitimacy. Most people still put more stock in a course from MIT than one from DeVry. If someone says "MIT", you immediately assume that they had to meet a fairly stringent academic requirement and that the lecturer or prof also had to meet a high requirement. The good schools literally have had hundreds of years to shape their good reputations, and its likely they will continue to capitalize on them.

Wrong.

[brunes69]

There normally is a HUGE difference between someone who gets a BCS degree and someone who has a stackload of certifications. If you have worked with both then you probbaly know what I am talking about. The massive glut of people with certs in the IT industry is the problem, not the solution. Anyone can buy a few books from Amazon.com, study for a month, and get a crapload of certifications. That doesn't mean they know the in depth fundamentals of computer science. What if some problem occurs on the job where they have to design a new algorithm to tackle a problem? Can an MCSD construct a skiplist in some random programming language he has never used before by the end of the day? I think not. It is the depth of education that marks the difference between a university graduate and someone who possess only certifications. Certifications are the equivalent of a vocational education - hands on training in a certain area. Without the acedemic background to be able to expand your knowledge, you will be stuch in nowheresville.

Re:Wrong.

[GigsVT]

I don't think you understand what I am saying.

There would be certifications in algorithm design, certifications in algorithm analysis, etc... They would be the same material that is taught in the course of a normal degree, only that the person and employer could pick and choose which skill set they wanted to pay for, on a micro level.

You are thinking about certifications as they exist today, i.e. specific training and certification usually tied to a commercial product. This is why I mentioned Brainbench, they had several abstract certifications that were approaching this goal.

Re:Wrong.

[cooldev]

In the end, a college course measures that competence with several quizzes, a couple tests, maybe a project or two, and an exam.

This sums up what is causing many of the people on this thread to miss the point. A college degree is, in a sense, a certification, so what does it matter if you get your certification through a trade school, online course, or traditional university?

Unfortunately, a degree isn't proof of anything more than the person had the ability to pass his classes. He may have skipped every class, gotten ahold of the previous year's test, and crammed just enough at the last minute to do decent on the test. My job, when I'm interviewing, is to ferret out those people and show them the door.

The problem is that measuring competence is hard. Attending college, going to and participating in class, working on projects, working with professors doing cutting-edge research in your field, and getting a part-time job to help do research or teach a class, are worth far more than the sum of the parts. A degree doesn't show proof that you took advantage of all of those opportunities, but it indicates you had them, whereas you probably wouldn't for most other types of certifications. That is one of the reasons that a degree will help get you "in the door": the inteviewer can then attempt to not only measure your knowledge, ability to learn, and character, but also find out whether you took advantage of your college experience, or were just passing time.

I could go on and on about the reasons for getting a degree... For instance, my experience is that people that are self taught are extremely knowledgeable about one area, but they have holes in their knowledge and often don't realize it. They don't know what they don't know.

But, in the end, college isn't perfect for everybody. I highly recommend it if you can afford it, but it's easy to waste the experience (expecially if you're intelligent) by gliding through like you did in high school, or treating it as if the exams were the goal, and not just goalposts.

No Discussion Forums

[Vagary]

I worked at Royal Roads University, a small Canadian university with a focus on distance postgraduate degrees. It was common knowledge there that the real value in an education is interaction with your peers and professor. As a result, a lot of their education delivery theory focused around discussion groups.

MIT isn't really giving much of anything away. The valuable part of a university education is discussion with your peers and feedback from your professor. All you're getting on this website is a library of multimedia textbooks.

However this could be very valuable to other, much more modest institutions who can't afford to produce their own multimedia textbooks. To take this poverty to its logical extreme is to create entirely peer-driven classes -- no professor, everything marked by your classmates. Which is a much more exciting idea than just watching reproductive biology lectures naked.

"the intelligence to learn things on their own"

[StupendousMan]

GigsVT wrote:

What is the difference if someone learns something by reading online documents or by going to hear some windbag talk about it for 50 minutes? There isn't. ... I couldn't recommend it to anyone with the intelligence to learn things on their own.

People can read material in books just as well as they can read them on-line. Libraries have existed for centuries. If your argument is correct, universities should ALREADY be obsolete. No one should need to go to college, because everyone can just read books and gain all the skills and knowledge he needs.

And, yes, I not only went through college, but I now work at one. I'm one of the windbags that GigsVT mentioned. Would you like me to poll the students in my class? "Okay, guys, I'll just stop coming to class, preparing lectures and readings, giving you homework, and answering your questions. Instead, I'll just wait until the quarter ends and give you the final exam."

Care to wager how many of those students would jump at the chance to avoid this old windbag?

Degrees and Such

[puto]

Well, as a tech who who went to school for CS and has some certs here is what the market wants.

Ok, you are a 22 years old and a Linux god. You know Php, CGI, et al ad naueseam. You got a semi decent project on source forge. Where are your big bucks?

Well a company looks at it this way. A degree shows that you took the time and completed something. Whether it is in CS or underwater basketweaving. And you might not know fuck all about anything but you showed a little discipline.
AND college really can teach you some much needed social skills to survive in the real world. I do not care how good you are at what you do, if you piss of the customers cause you are l33t and they ain't, your out the door. And this also means that the Think Geek cap and Spawn t-shirt are not appropriate apparel for all occasions.

Online courseware is great, and I am one of those people who can pick up things easily from a book. But you know what? Regular classes are great too, you make friends,contacts, meet girls, get out the house.

All my practical knowledge in this industry I picked up on my own. IS was just starting to hit Unis so the courses were not all the good. I took a lotta business classes which have come in handy.

I like to see someone with a degree and mad skills. Good combination. Degrees are not that hard, and unis can come cheap here in the us. And if you got the skils you can get a job to pay for the school are do it yourself.

And before you come down on me. I got a GED at 20, started college at 23, finished at 28. Cause even though I got pretty good jobs with my skills, as soon as I got that paper, it opened many more doors.

So the online thing is great to a point. But you gotta have the real world behind it.

And at 32 years old I wish I could back do the uni earlier, and give my younger self a swift kick in the ass. Oh and buy some Microsoft stock ;)

Puto

education is people interaction

[peter303]

I have a MIT degree. Sure, you can learn a lot by reading the right stuff, even going to a college bookstore and buying the textbook (which generally dont exist for many MIT courses, because they are ahead of the material). But it is interacting with the instructor and fellow students that make the difference, whether doing problem exercises or in testing that really re-inforce whether you know the material or not.

curiosity and the taxpayer

[xipho]

Too many comments from people worrying about getting jobs and being "legitimized". Whatever happened to learning something for learning sake? This is free information that you would otherwise have to pay *thousands* of dollars for. Damn cool.

And another thing... In intro to grad-stats this semester I've been told that locking down/encrypting course-notes etc will be the wave of the future, this from a state school. Heaven forbid that Joe-taxpayer actually be able to learn on their own! YOU pay taxes that support ME going to school. Shouldn't you have access to all the information generated by your tax-dollars?

Information vs. Education

[be_all]

All through elementary school and high school, we are offered a myriad of courses in order to give us broad fundamental skills and to expose us to as much of an variety as possible.

But, beyond basic skills and experience, school teaches us how to deal with other people, how to intellectually relate to and cooperate with others, how to ask and answer questions.

College or university is no different. Now, you choose what you want to study, but you do is in an environment that focusses on honing your academic skills to the standards of true academia.

Course materials are a great information resource, nothing more. I think people in the technology industries tend to lose sight of this more than in other fields because so much detailed information is required in understanding all the different technologies out there. (Ironically, that is how people who have read all the manuals who mistake information for education.) Few people will read information sources just for the hell of it. That's where teachers come in: they provide focus and enthusiasm. Nothing is better for getting through a really boring course that a great professor. The teacher motivates, guides, and assesses: a very important job.

But ultimately--and I think this is what they believe at MIT and why they're not too concerned about giving the material away for free--degrees are about learning how to apply the fundamental academic skills to the chosen material, and obtaining one is about interacting in an academic environment.

But, in the real world, if all a person needs is certification for administering an Apache web server, then give them a certification course (information). If they need to understand an Apache web server, give them an university course (education).

Two Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense MIT would be the one to do this. Universities in general are becoming more and more like corporations, trying to maximize revenue by any means possible. MIT on the other hand focuses on science and engineering, and both those fields place high value on spreading the information they develop. Think about the push among scientists to get away from expensive scientific journals and publish on the web for free instead.

My other thought is that this could be very useful in developing countries that can't afford an extensive university system. Bright people who want to learn a field could pick it up over then net. Not as good as going to a school, but a whole lot better than nothing.

Open Degree Programs

[MichaelPenne]

The next evolution I see (as a courseware developer at a university) is an open degree program: folks take the best classes for their degree from schools all over the world, and then receive the degree from their preferred degree granting institution.

The benefits of this is that one is not limited to the quality of classes at your local U, if the CS dept is better at MIT, or a particular class is better at Yale, on can take the course there (virtually).

The things that local schools will provide: computer/web access, standard software and help for that software, places to collaborate with other students, get cheap beer and pizza, take classes that require in person interaction, places to take proctored tests, etc.

Overall, moving a good part of education online will help free us from the geographical bounds that currently make it tough for kids from San Diego (or Capetown) to get an MIT education, while allowing the best teachers to teach the best students from around the world.

Of course, how to pay & get paid for all this is another issue, and the one currently holding back alot of technology use in education.

Some of the other problems:

Faculty often don't get paid for taking the time to put their materials online. Some schools have a team that does this for the faculty, but many other schools expect them to learn to make their web pages themselves.

(The irony is that while the don't get paid to type and format their lectures in html and draw their diagrams in illustrator or gimp, they _do_ get paid to spend man-decades of their teaching career scrawling on blackboards! One of the things that drives me nuts about the "traditional" in class experience is sitting around or trying to keep up while a prof. scratches away at a black board or white board when this information could be so much better displayed in a nice, readable font on a projected website!)

The effectiveness of classes is often partly judged by how many students show up. We had a prof. who teaches an 7am ecology class take all his very good online materials down because he got marked down on reviews for having so few students show up.

Of course the problems with monitoring testing & providing hands on technology help for students who lack tech skills, the 'digital divide'.

Fair use of copywritten materials.

In any event, it's a great first step by MIT. Hopefully the politics and economics of online education will catch up with the technology someday.

Excellent Idea

[j_kenpo]

I have to commend MIt for their effort in this field. This is definitly a idea whos time should have happened much earlier. Inside of our online learning portion of our intranet, we offer many such free courses to individuals in our company willing to learn (hence our title for this "Willing Learner"). I know of other professors at local Universitis that would take full advantage of this. An idea like this coming from MIT can only raise the bar of education for other institutions and students willing to take advantage of this. I can say Ill be looking at some of this content myself...

"Online Superstars"

[aricusmaximus]

Being someone who was in the online education market (pre dot-bomb), let me tell you *exactly* what's going to happen (and in fact I've already seen happening):

Right now every teacher for every class delivers lectures. In the future (10-20 years), this will be the exception. Here's what we'll see:

• As with music and books, will be an online store of "greatest hits" - collections of the best online lectures and course materials (tests, activities, skills tests).
  
• The vast majority of instructors will be relegated either to being "support" positions (like most T.A.'s today), roaming class bulletin boards, or being "production assistants" to the Professorial "Superstar", or proctors (grading) for non-automated (e.g. non-multiple choice) tests and assignments.

This is analogous to what's happened in the music industry. Live band performances are the exception, not the rule. Live bands were killed by the invention of records, CD's, and video. (Most) Live courses are going to be killed by the internet. There's simply no need for 1000's of professors to do "covers" of the material one professor (or a good team of educators) can create and distribute online.

FYI - here's how a new (and very good!) online course is produced and automated:

1. A "Superstar" Professor ("Prof. BIG IQ") and her team creates an online course.
   
2. She teaches the course for one quarter. (alpha-testing)
   
3. She reviews how the course went, and finds ways to automate (via reorganizing and adding more course material, more skills checks) the areas that students find hard to understand. The goal is to have the course "automate" the questions the students ask most.
   
4. She "tests" the course again, by teaching it another quarter (beta-testing).
   
5. She repeats steps 3 and 4 (rewriting, adding, revising, and testing) until "the course practically teaches itself".
   
6. The course is finally "published" and, in fact is better than 99% of the "non-automated" courses out there. Professor "BIG IQ" (and her support team) now moves onto the next challenge.
   
   Note that I use "is produced" rather than "will be produced in the future" up above, because it's already happening.
   
   You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

OpenCourseWare is in *beta*

[McIntyre]

I've had the pleasure and opportunity to be involved in the Web development side of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), and just from coding up all the sample exams, lecture notes, handouts and problem sets I've learned an amazing amount without even intending to. Today, for instance, I'm delving into the world of Linguistics and the intricacies of Tagalog and Athabaskan Slave-Hare.

It is not just the usual course syllabus and general course information going up on these sites.

It is important to keep in mind that Sept. 30th is the "public beta" of the pilot site for the MIT OCW project. We are making our first batch of course sites available to the world, while we continue to work out the kinks and bugs in anticipation for the full launch a year from now.

For someone who is self-taught in Web development and research (like many others here), MIT OCW is not just a valuable tool for teachers and people already knowledgeable of the subject matter on the site, it's an incredible resource for everyone who has access to it -- from the very basic programming skills taught in "Introduction to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving," to the complex mathematics of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory.

Definitely check out the site on Sept. 30 and let us know what you think. Your feedback will help us as we continue to improve.