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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."
I was eagerly awaiting the launch of this program, and unfortunately am now a little bit dissapointed. I think it is a fantastic idea in principal, but most of the classes don't seem to offer much. A handful (especially in the mathematics department) are excellent and even have videotaped lectures that can be seen online.
Others have only thin offerings, such as lecture notes alone. In some cases the lecture notes are extensive, but in others they are just minimal outlines of the lecture and are not useful if you did not attend this lecture. (These could be made useful if video lectures were subsequently provided)
I'm interested to see if other course directors follow the lead of the better prepared OCW sites. I think there is great potential, but it remains to be seen exactly how OCW will fare.
The required text is Writing Economics by Neugeboren and Jacobson. You do not need to buy it. A copy will be provided for you. You are expected to read this text and follow its instructions in the work you hand in for this class, even though we will not cover the text in detail in the lectures. Other texts you might want to consult are A Guide for the Young Economist by Thomson, The Practice of Econometrics: Classic and Contemporary by Berndt, Elements of Style by Strunk and White, Stata® manuals, and The MIT Undergraduate Journal of Economics.
Humpf. So where do I sign up for that?
MIT's enthusiasm for this project is refreshing, and certainly quite encouraging. But online education is not particularly new, and all that MIT are adding to the mix is a qualifications system, which could certainly be quite handy.
The role of education in modern society, however, is under question, since the ability to look up facts instantly (rather than knowing them) can make people appear to be a lot smarter than they really are.
I have no problem with this. I'd rather people had common sense and an ability to use information, rather than just being a know-all.
If you need to hire a programmer to write a proprietary TCP/IP driver for your new device, you can hire someone who a) is expensive and a TCP/IP driver expert, or b) someone who is cheaper, very smart, can turn their hands to anything, and uses the Internet to research how TCP/IP drivers work. Most companies these days would choose person B.
And the main point?
Education is overrated, since anyone with a decent IQ and a large reference library (say.. the Internet) can work out how to do things that you once needed a degree to do.
mogorific carpentry experiments
...is that the lecture notes were far more comprehensive, and intuitive than those corresponding to the same course I took at a different university. One of the things I was looking forward to about this OpenCourseWare was comparing the teaching styles of professors from different universities. I've only checked out this one course (Laboratory in Software Engineering), but so far the score is 1-0 in favour of MIT. I wish I had these online lecture notes available to me when deciding on my university. Perhaps I would have made a better decision - I've yet to finish my degree (taking at least a year off) in CS in most parts because I just didn't feel I was at the right institution. This would have played an integral role in my decision making process if all universities made this material online and publicized it.
Forgive me if this is available on the site, I might not have seen it, but is the software for creating this site available? Are there web based tools for creating the individual course pages and maintaining them? Are the eventually going to be open sourced? Does it make it easy for the professor to create the page (i.e. .doc to pdf conversion and so on)?
At my school we have a system that I assume we purhased called WebCT, and, frankly, it sucks. In fact for a supposedly technology driven school, we have some crappy resources. A bunch of sun workstations and 6 dollar copies of Windows XP, whoopteedo. I digress.
However, in my rhetoric class we handle all document management (turning in papers, journal entries, teachers notes, etc) via an online service provided by the University of Texas Austin. Aside from some really hokey things (strands of learning? that sounds rather new age) it is an interesting way to turn in papers and recieve feedback. It is pretty raw, but it has potential.
It is supposedly going to be open sourced (it is a php/mysql thing, I know because I saw the standard mysql overload page on it one day). Any other schools have systems like this? UTDallas does not, but then again, UTDallas sucks.
I'm teaching a scientific computing (numerical analysis and programming) course at Duke right now, and I just sent links to a couple of these courses out to my students. Specifically Numerical Methods in Chemical Engineering and Linear Algebra. The former contains some good stuff, including a Matlab tutorial. The latter has Java demos including one showing an idea that I've already has a homework on (SVD). My class is already "paperless", in that the homeworks are all posted online and submitted electronically over email and grades are sent in the form of detailed reports for each student's submitted work. This fits right in with this online-only system.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
I'm taking Linear Algebra (Bates College) right now and we are using Gilbert Strang's textbook, "Introduction to Linear Algebra 2nd edition". The first section of OCW I went to was Mathematics and then Linear Algebra.. lo' and behold, 34 ~40minute long videos of Strang himself lecturing. I might not even go to my class anymore!