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

OpenEDU?

[swordboy]

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.

Re:Wrong.

[Hal-9001]

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