Slashdot Mirror
MIT OpenCourseWare Now Online
peter303 writes "A sampling of MIT's OpenCourseWare selections appered online today. The courses cover a full range of departments, but only a couple apiece. The material ranges ranges from just syllabi and calendars to extensive on-line course notes and interative demos. To succeed, OpenCourseWare must also be an advantage to MIT faculty and students, as well as the outside world. I think this may be possible, because it gives a uniform appearance and access point for online material, plus tools to build these."
Damnit, this is not just a good idea. This level of self-description should be mandatory for all universities. It's the first serious proof I've ever seen that the institution is actually doing something with all that tuition and grant money. Plus it provides a more solid basis for choosing a school than campus tours and the quality of the football team.
The Copyright Law (partly) gets in the way of putting all the course materials online. The other problem is sheer volume. It's going to take awhile before they figure out how to get all the stuff up there. Some subjects will work better than others. Math will probably do well, history will probably be not so good because of percentage of copyrighted stuff used in history courses versus math courses.
It will get better and richer as they figure it out. It'll definitely be a good resource but it'll never be an MIT (TM) education.
The role of a college education isn't force you to memorize facts, but to learn how to solve problems. That's why a good number of engineering classes these days are open-book or open-notes. The only time I have found this to not be the case is when the professor has had a hard time finding meaningful questions that wouldn't require a couple hours to complete. In those cases closed-book was necessary to allow some "show me what you remember" type questions to creep in. Simply memorizing facts gets you nowhere, although you MAY be able to dazzle an easily intimidated interviewer by spewing out some facts.
doesn't happen over night. The simple fact that they are moving in this direction is wonderful in my opinion.
Now when do I receive my diploma in the mail for as little as $39.95 as the email stated?
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress. A diversity of approaches to problems results from a diversity of different experiences. That oddball approach some professor is teaching at a small university may just be the basis for the next important breakthrough, or at least make the school's graduates fill some important niche in science and engineering not as well filled by others.
It's like languages, cultures, genetics, and ecology: we really do lose something important when global communications carry a few dominant paradigms (or organisms) everywhere. Monocultures of the mind may be more risky and costly than monocultures of plants.
You are right. But remember that taking all those math classes really had little to do with math. What you really learned to do is solve problems and organize your thoughts. That is the goal of most classes, it's not always obvious what they are teaching you until it's too late and you learned something else - a more important lesson. Those sneaking teachers.
Memorizing the Constitution is fine, but it aint going to get you a job. Knowing how to think logically and knowing when you don't know something is the key to being successful in most careers.
LoRider