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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?"
>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.
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
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
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Here at McGill in Montreal, we've got the beginings os this type of system set up - cool.mcgill.ca has about six courses on-line now. Each lecture is composed of all the slides used in the actual lecture, plus the voice track of the lecturer synch'ed to the slides. Useful when you're too hung over to go to Friday morning Chemistry
Cue The Sun...
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.
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.
The case is analogous to software source code. The course materials, on their own, are worthless. They have to be interpreted and kept current by a knowlegable instructor to have value. What constitutes knowlegable is accredation through peer review.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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.
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 agree with Keebler71. For anything other than IT, you really need to be at a university. When I started college 8 years ago, I studied Physics. Sure, you could pick up some introductory books in physics and teach yourself the basics, but, once you get past the basic freshman and sophomore physics, you WILL need some instruction from sources other than books. Have you ever tried to read a book on statistical thermal dynamics or quantum mechanics? I guarantee that unless you are at the level of Einstein or Feynman, you would not be able to learn these topics on your own for the first time.
;-)
Another thing is that many technical fields outside of IT and CS actually require equipment or expensive software in order for you to learn the topics. For instance, when was the last time you bought a spectrum analyzer or a logic synthesis tool like Synopsys Design Compiler?
What people seem to forget is that a college education gives you a broad background to think critically about the world. You don't have to study an area that relates to your current job. You just need a good background to help you through life.
After college, I worked for 2 years in the EE field and whenever we hired people, we only hired people with BS in EE or a BS in CS. We would not even look at a candidate with just certifications. When I went to work for the corporate arm of the company, it was very IT focused, but even then, when we were hiring, we never even called back a candidate unless they had a bachelor's degree.
I just went back to college (CMU) to get my Masters degree in Electrical Engineering. I can tell you that there is no way that I would have been able to learn what I am learning now without being at a university. I know that when I graduate, I will have more options open to me than if I stayed in my previous job. So all you people who think you can get by with certifications, please keep pushing forward on that path. That will help me get a job more easily after I graduate.
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?
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
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).
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.
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.
If anyone is wondering, the link is http://web.mit.edu/ocw/ . It can also be found at www.mit.edu just press the OpenCourseWare link.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I've been touting OKI and OpenCourseWare since we first heard about it. I'm working on a PhD in Instructional Tech, and I have to deal with people from SCORM, BlackBoard, and WebCT all the time.
What the people whose employments are threatened by open course stuff say is that MIT is doing this to force their faculty to create new stuff. Bullocks!
I personally do not care where it comes from, or why it's being distributed for free, but, if the quality is high, it will cause some change to the field.
PS - If you're looking for an Open Source prokect that's up this alley, look into textweaver.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
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
Unless you're willing to go through the (somewhat exhaustive) process of having your little organization accredited as a college (which may not be possible for such an org- I'm not sure what the standards are, but I think having your own curriculum might be one), such degrees would have no more standing than the '6.99 Ph.D Extravaganza' message I keep getting in my hotmail inbox. Using MIT's information to actually issue degrees might also introduce some copyright problems- you're no longer using their info for personal enrichment, you're using it to run a business. Trouble would ensue.
I know that being able to prove you know the material may be important to many of us but for me this is just nifty as hell. science and computers and all that nifty geek crap we're into is my hobby. I don't think I could ever be a quantum physicist for a job but I love "the knowing" of it.
This is very cool for those of us that just want "the knowing."
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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...
Lots of very interesting opinions being expressed here, but considering our recent experience with Firefly let's hold off on analyzing MIT's program until Sept 30 when it's actually released. Then we can actually look at some of the course material and THEN unleash our praises and criticisms. Personally, having attended a small, non-geek-friendly liberal arts college because I was too introverted to move away from home, I'm salivating to partake of a little vicarious MIT experience, even in a small way.
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:
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:
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.
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.