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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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
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
The key words are "so far". Folks, this is just the beginning of OCWare. At least it's not vapour-ware anymore :-)
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.