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More Universities to Publish Courseware Online
prostoalex writes "After MIT's decision to put the course materials online free of charge, seven other universities expressed similar goals. With the grant from Hewlett-Packard the universities of Washington, Rochester, Toronto, Cornell, Columbia, Ohio State as well as MIT will provide their courses online at a single location. DSpace was launched with a $1.8 million grant from HP. MIT expects to spend about $250,000 annually to maintain and operate the archive. The page is available here." We also have an update on MITs courseware offerings, so read more if you care about such things.
In related news, dchud writes "DSpace, which has been in production use at MIT Libraries since September, is now available under a BSD-style license as version 1.0 at sourceforge. DSpace is a repository for capturing, persisting, and providing access to the digital research output of the MIT community, and will be the long-term archive for OpenCourseWare materials. Now it's available as an institutional repository platform for the rest of the world. See also coverage from the Boston Globe, CNET, and the AP (via NYT, reg req'd)."
Speaking of books online, don't forget about Baen Books, and their free online library: http://www.baen.com/library/ they know that allowing people to sample stuff for free online is good for business. So you can download many of their books, quite legal.The thought is, if you like it you probably want to buy something from the same author (much as it is with music sharing, according to Janis Ian)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Cornell, although not formally endorsing it, has many of it's online course materials already open to the public. Our course-management system called Courseinfo has most course information available to the public.
For a more "mainstream" approach Cornell has also developed Cybertower which is a free service that provides a very multimedia-based (Quicktime based...so get your Crossover plugin for Linux users) glimse into some of the course offerings. (Although Cornell's strong Engineering department is hardly represented, if at all.) I would guess that many schools have resources like this availible...you just have to know where to look. Are there any other good links to course related sites out there?
At my university, we use Blackboard.
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
With the horrible aftermath of the disastrous merger to deal with, does HP have this kind of money to give away?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The collaborative effort of the institutions mentioned, and the stories posted, are not primarily focused on courseware (although they are explicitly intended to support long-term storage and access to courseware materials). The goal of these efforts, which in these stories surround the DSpace project specifically, is to extend the range of services provided by these institutions, more specifically their libraries, to incorporate a scaleable model of digital shelf space. In other words, these are infrastructure efforts (so if you really are impressed by that part, don't bother reading on!).
At MIT Libraries, for instance, the main focus of their DSpace implementation is to capture the digital products of research conducted within the MIT community. This includes articles, books, technical reports, theses, datasets, audio files, videos, images, maps, and so on. Much like the existing physical library buildings and collections, these are to be organized according to how they can best serve the departments, labs, schools, and research centers at the Institute, which the new exception being that at first DSpace will focus on capturing materials generated locally, rather than selecting and collecting materials produced externally. Or worse, research materials that are generated locally by people at MIT, then given to publishers, and then sold back to the libraries at great cost. So from an infrastructure perspective, what they are trying to achieve is to extend the range of what libraries provide in terms of collections and services to now also include all kinds of digital materials, starting especially with digital materials created at MIT.
A few examples illustrate this best: first, consider the junior faculty member with her own articles on her department web page. We've all seen such web pages disappear within 1-3 years. What happens to her colleagues at other institutions who lose access to her articles, which maybe never got published in traditional outlets, but are nonetheless vital to their own work, and thereafter are reduced to so many broken bookmarks? At MIT, DSpace will take stewardship of those materials, giving them a persistent url and carefully recording descriptive, technical, and preservation metadata about the files and their formats. So in this case, DSpace takes that 1-3 year period of unreliable access and extends it to a minimum of 3-7 years of predictably reliable access. At this point in the web's history, you can't really get that anywhere else, and there's every reason to hope that number will really reach into the decades; it just can't be promised reasonably today.
A second example: an interactive, multimedia, experiential web resource administered by some professor on an aging redhat 6.0 machine under their desk. It's rich in data, it demonstrates a breakthrough in the state of the art, or the idea, in some nascent discipline, and it's widely used by scholars of that discipline, and it _can't_ be "just printed out". What happens when that machine blows a partition, or is comprimised because its amateur sysadmin is really a scholar, not a wizard?
Obviously, as indicated in the story, a good third example is courseware materials. If you look closely at OCW or the other well-known examples thereof, you'll see that in many ways, they are (IMHO) foremost publishing ventures serving the educational process. Getting the materials into standard form, getting them delivered by a deadline, keeping them viable during their relevant terms. Doing this so openly, and freely, is indeed very exciting. But every term that comes up introduces new classes, new upkeep, etc., and you have to have an answer for where the materials from the previous semesters' courses are going to land. There has to be infrastructure support for that, and having a service in the libraries providing long term persistent storage and access to do just that is an awfully good answer, if the tools, policies, and budget are in place to do that.
These examples were much better articulated by several of the excellent speakers at yesterday's launch event (sorry, couldn't find a link), and are increasingly recognized as very common and very troubling scenarios across academia. Once you think about what the technological requirements of providing that infrastructure are, it quickly comes clear that such initiative require solid, reliable software with lucid, maintainable designs, and no magic. After all, you could do it with just a filesystem, right? :) To get the services delivered properly, and in a way scholars can trust, however, you have to focus on developing policy, procuring budget, and delivering on an mission-driven focus of getting the service right and keeping it running. In other words, what you don't see behind the systems is the amount of non-technical work behind getting these things going, and making them sustainable.
The focus of the multi-institutional efforts is to expand, replicate, and formalize approaches to doing the same at many other large institutions where the impact can be equally significant. Seeing the level of public and private support of these efforts, and that there's a line in the sand now drawn with a software release marking a reliable starting point to answering the technical question, is quite exciting, and indeed is a breakthrough. If you really still think nothing new is being offered, and that DSpace isn't more than a stripped down sourceforge thinking like a card catalog, send me email and I'll direct your attention to a few folks at MIT and HP who will blow your mind with how well they've thought through and planned for these problems. :)
People are really getting hyped up about nothing here.
In a far-away country known as Finland, the universities are free (as in beer) both on- and off-line. And yes, this also applies to foreign nationals. The education provided is atleast as good as in the US (quality is high because the tests are hard, no multiple choice).
As a side note, some people might argue that the universities are not truly free since the government pays for it. They would be right, of course, but the cost is not that high, about $2,000 per student per year (educated guess).