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.

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

[Soft]

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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).

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.