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."
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?
Excellent news. However, I feel it's necessary to point out that because the courseware is heavily based on the work of others, it's only proper to credit them with the naming of the courseware. I propose "Einstein/Edison/Socrates/Plato/Fermi/MIT/OpenCour seWare"
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
This looks like a good opportunity to realize your limitations. Taking courses at MIT, with the prof's, TA's, & classmates to confer with would be difficult enough.
Taking the same things remotely / autonomously sounds impossible.
When they put the courseware for St. Clair County Community College online, it might me a bit more accessible to us commoners.
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.
I think the point that they are trying to make is that you won't do well in that course if you can't write well. Which is true for many courses in University.
At least they are offering some resources which might help those who have trouble communicating well in their written work.
I guess one might argue that writing well is something that you learn by writing often. You can buy books that will help you, but this is one of those courses that you won't master through acquiring new facts from your text.
...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.
....hacking at MIT. Wonder if MIT hackers can create a fake page and alter the DNS entries so anyone going to the OCW page ends up at the hacked page.
It's actually quite the eye opener to be able to go through their mathematics courses and see how the material differs from the stuff they teach at my school. Most of it is pretty similar, and this certainly takes away the mystique that MIT had before I took a look at it all. I guess if your admissions standards and tuition fees are astronomically high that's enough too keep a stellar reputation.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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.
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.
- to promote communication at MIT. They hope that everyone will be able to quickly find out what other people are teaching, what textbooks they're using, what's being covered, and what's not being covered.
- "open source" the resources that go into course production. Obviously, then, to make this same information available to scholars elsewhere, so that teachers at other places can see what MIT is doing and borrow resources, compare notes, make suggested changes.
- Challenge typical lecture classes. I think that they're hoping to challenge MIT faculty to think of what the 'value added' is to classes, so that people realize that learning is about more than 'dumping content' into students' heads, and consider the pedagogical use of classes more carefully.
- Provide resources for self-study. Sure-- there is a hope that someone out there in Alaska or something will take up some resources and teach themselves something.
- Challenging notions of what is university IP or not. As many know, who owns what syllabi that is produced by faculty is hairy; if MIT puts it on the web, they hope that this will deflate the whole debate, and make everyone realize that a syllabus is not synonymous with learning.
- Provide a model for the universities in online spaces. I think they're hoping that this will at least challenge people to think beyond 'how can we make a buck off putting courses online' and realize the role that universities could play in a networked age for contributing to the intellectual commons.
As I understand it, those are the purposes of open coursewear, roughly. They're really not thinking that people will train themselves so much, as they're thinking that it will help change the nature of discourse around universities in online education.http://joystick101.org getting in depth, with games.
I found that the material was the same, but the method of delivery was far more refined and comprehensive. I think I would have actually done much better at M.I.T. than the institution I studied at, because of this. The quality of the professors is evident in their lecture notes.
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.
Currently at MIT doing CS Grad studies. Both of my professors are excellent lecturers and the different between them and the vast majority of my professors at my previous institution are staggering.
Humorless sig goes here.
I teach some CompSci courses in a small colombian college (its name better unknow).
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Ive found that many universities put online material for students, obviously THEIR student, but anyway is on the net, and many persons, included me, use this material in order to get ideas for classes, exercises, exams, etc. <br>
Ive read some MIT courses material (from opencourseware), and it seems great, but not to much... coming from MIT...
It's delightful to know that people still want to make sure that knowledge will remain free.
OPEN and FREE information is. The vast majority of my college classes had comprehensive lecture notes and other reference materials (including old exams) online - getting it up there isn't hard.
The difference was that access was password protected. The University viewed the material as property and expected people to pay for the classes to have access to it. If you wern't in the class, you didn't get to look at the material. After all, if you can get the material for free, why would you pay for a distance education class?
"Back in the day" all sorts of university course and research information was available online - but then universities started taking most of it down. The information being online is unremarkable - that it's available for free is the unique part.
paintball
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
Almost every computing science course I've taken, with a few exceptions, has been open-book. So reading off a book isn't cheating at all.
The idea behind applied sciences is that it's real-world preparation, and in the real world, you're allowed to look at books if you don't know how to do something.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Apparently not from the English department, though...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
one potential problem is the varying amounts of readings for class. A math class, with one etxt book, would be far more accessable, than say, a management or econ class with readings from a variety of journals.
Some journals are available on-line, and public libraries often have access to databases for fee-based articles, but pulling the articles togetehr will often be difficult. Compounding this is the use of case studies, which are cash cows for schools such as Harvard. What would be real helpful is the availability of inexpensive ecucational access (with limited d/ls per month to keep non-ed users out) to anyone so they could get the 50 or articles/cases they need.
Th etrade off is the potential loss of sales to traditional users (which can be as much as $20/student/qtr per class at BSchool) who get cases and articles online for less vs the addin sales potential as on-line use increases.
At least MIT is pushing in the right direction.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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!
I've taken plenty of Distance Education courses here at SFU, and I find the staff/TA support to be exceptional. It's really nice when you're taking courses that use the opportunities distance ed offers to their full extent, because usually that means that you can reach TAs and instructors just about every day, rather than simply once or twice a week during their office hours.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Education has always been overrated.
Horseshit.
Everybody learns at different speeds and learn faster with different methods
True. And if I want to hire someone who can assimilate information and use it fast enough to do the work I need to do, then I will probably want to hire someone who could learn and do fast enough to get through a degree program.
This is a great experiment, and the material is very useful. I'm sure I'll be using it myself in the coming years.
However, classroom learning *does not* really translate well online. Online coursework, if it's serious at all, requires a whole different approach- including several different kinds of interactivity. For MIT to offer *real* online coursework, it would require designing it specifically for that purpose, and probably producing it entirely separately. The reality is two separate universities- cyberspace and meatspace.
That said, this is still pretty neat.
All the reasons you cite are good reasons for doing this. But most have to do with sharing information within MIT. Whereas the school has not only put this stuff out on the public web, they've made a lot of noise encouraging non-MIT people to come and use it.
I think this is more-or-less just what they're doing. ONly thing is that alot of course homepages are eventually taken down, or sometimes even password-protected. In any case, the course homepages are usually presented only for students in the class. The OCW courseware is MEANT to be publically viewable. It doesn't necessarily mean the professor is willing to put more time into making it better, but now the school will actively support the endeavour to make them publically accessible.
make world, not war
The key words are "so far". Folks, this is just the beginning of OCWare. At least it's not vapour-ware anymore :-)
Well, if the person who moderated you replies to your post, their moderation to the post gets cancelled. Anyways, it was probably moderated funny because you put in "
:-d
". Preview next time.
Of course, this is no reason to moderate it funny. Oh well, karma isn't that important anymore anyways.
On a sidenote, hope joystick101.org gets put back up, I've got a few ideas burning that are being wasted on kuro5hin.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
What was your point again?
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Just wait until you hire a few people and see which ones fall apart under pressure.
A degree program proves how you managed to make it through a degree program. The lack thereof shows a lack of ability to muster all of the components of completion, ie. resources, determination, intelligence, the ability to stick with and attain a goal.
Higher education is like an obstacle course. If you want to, you can say that it trains you to get through obstacle courses. Or you can decide that if you need someone with some stamina, some ability and the desire to finish something, you might want to go looking at those who've completed an obstacle course, rather than those who could've given enough time, or a ride to the obstacle course, or long-term, low-intensity obstacle course training.
But MIT is doing two things that are real steps forward. First, they're settings standards: instructors are expected to post certain kinds of information in a standard format. Existing course web sites are just online alternatives to photocopied class handouts, and it's up the individual instructors exactly what they bother to put online and how they present it.
But what's really staggering is MIT's attitude towards public use of this material. Most course web sites are created specifically for the students taking the course -- public access is an accidental side effect, and probably wouldn't happen at all if University web sites secured their networks properly. They'd probably be taken down or hidden behind a firewall if public access started taxing the servers. Which is completely different from what MIT is doing: investing in servers and bandwidth for no other purpose than to enable public access to their content.
I think that this is a great idea. All public universities should start doing it. Professors and students at any university now have more information available to them. Students can learn better and professors can teach better.
Now the next steps.
1. Start publishing textbooks online. The only people who make money off of textbooks anyway are the publishers and bookstores. Why not make the material freely available? Textbooks published by professors at public universities should be made available with an open copyright. Textbooks have become very expensive and limit a student's access to material. I used to try to read at least one other textbook in addition to the one that was assigned in class.
2. Start publishing papers online. This is the same situation. A professor writes a paper that is published in the IEEE Transactions on XXXXXX. The information is now copyrighted and I have to pay to read it. This limits a student's access to the material.
Freeing up this material and making it available electronically would have a strong effect on education and research.
is that the MIT site is really responsive, even with inevitable slashdotting. I'm impressed by how fast the pages are loading, which says something for the people who did the actual implementation. Way to go folks!
I took three calculas courses at the local commity college in high school. Didn't even cover as material as the first semester of MIT.
Sadly, the Real Media streams coming off the MIT site seem to be totally unreliable. Even across a DSL line, I'm not able to get through 10 minutes without the connection (and realplayer) going belly-up. Groan. So near, yet so far.