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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?"
Let us pick up freely what we want to learn, and do it at our own pace... We do not need anyone to put a stamp on our foreheads, saying 'this guy knows classical Latin' or 'I understand special relativity'.
During my entire life, I have had to pass exams and more exams, written, oral, practical, whatever; I know where to go if I need qualifications, but, for once, I think this is a wonderful opportunity to learn what we would like to know, unspoilt by grades, notes, or whatever the devil thinks next!
I've always wondered what makes classroom instruction so damn expensive. After the need to *cough*repeat*cough* some classes over, I thought about something:
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.
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.
Once the material was created, I don't see why there couldn't be an "open university" to be used freely by everyone. Obviously, there'd need to be testing centers created, but that is another topic.
College is too expensive. It doesn't have to be.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
But the advantage of having completed university coursework for a topic like algorithm design or algorithm analysis is that the grade for that course will represent competence in that field as measured over the course of a quarter or semester. I find it difficult to believe that someone's competence in such an open-ended and abstract field can be assessed by a score on an exam taken in the span of a few hours.
My $0.02
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
So they give out a few courses...
Do they give away things they consider real IP?
For example.... a student (hhh@mit.edu) of theirs came up with a lameass protocol for VoIP (sort of since its over real ethernet packets, not IP packets). That was sold off to a company call NBX corp and their ip rights included lots of cool things like gnu zip and gnu tar from what I've heard of the license agreement. These were later were bought by 3com and all included in a product you can buy today for way too much money.
Now that 3com is selling me gnuzip, how do I get source or is it some special deal with MIT so they don't have to provide that even though strings shows "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License" and other worthless nonsense.
Did I mention that 3com was one of the few IT companies that supported the DMCA?
I have just emailed my Member of Parliament suggesting that our government encourage universities here to do the same at MIT.
To be effective the universities should be given credit that leads to increases in funding.
I hope others will contact their MP's too. A good way is Fax Your MP