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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)."
foots the bill for this $250,000/yr that it's going to cost to maintain the site? Is it going to be added to tuition which is already high enough here in Canada and is outrageous in the U.S.??
On a sidenote, at least they're reducing the amount of paper used to print those often useless textbooks professors make us buy!!
Don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow. You'll most likely find a better way to do it!
I fully understand the need for paid professors in the university system. I must say, however, I love the fact that free information is available to me solely for the betterment of myself and my personal enlightenment.
~ fact is not dependant upon your belief therein. ~ ~ Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
Is there any way I'll be able to download degrees from these Universities? :)
In all seriousness, though, this is a great idea. I think serious prospective students might find it easier to choose one of these Universities since they'll have a better idea of just what they'd learn in their programs.
I think this is a great move. At least for the general public. It may, however, be a bad business decision for the university. I don't care what /.ers think, freely giving away information very often does not lead to profit.
Universities are not in the business of making profit. If their economy is hard pressed, they could in theory compensate the missing revenues by higher tuition. Then the average cost per student would be the same, but there would be plenty of additional benefits. For example, students will never have to hesitate on whether to get some material, and they can check out material for other classes if the need arises. Not to mention the benefit to society at large, now anyone can get their hands on first-rate material.
That being said, I feel a bit cheated because I recently took a bunch of online courses from Columbia University. At about $1000/credit, it kinda bothers me that people can get something similar for free (of course, you can't get a degree this way).
Please, is this a joke? You were exposed to a system that sucked, and therefore it is unfair if somebody else gets a better deal. Grow up.
Tor
Is there a reason the submitter forgot to mention one of the best universities in the world? I had the fortune to go there; one of my lecturers invented the subroutine....
Then again, we still consider Harvard to be one of our colleges - founded by John H of Emanuel before the US of A was a country!
For example, as more and more schools publish their information, it should become possible to discover things like:
- How up-to-date is a given course?
- Do the professors rely exclusively on their own texts?
- Is a given course pretty much stagnant?
- Is there a general consensus about what should be in, say, a quantum mechanics course?
This is just a small sample of the sort of meta-information implicit in the availability of such information, and as the number of schools placing materials online grows, so too does the value and interest to be found in mining such data.I'd rather fall off Ilustrada than ride any other horse
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
And while it certainly wouldn't be an unbreakable rule, if I found Local State U's online material valuable while I was in high school, chances are really good that I would apply there for undergraduate school. That's exactly the type of applicant a CS department wants - self directed, motivated, with a head start, and ready to hit the ground running.
While none of that is a 1. 2. 3. plan for profit, there are other vital stats that can benefit a school, such as word of mouth and/or internet reputation. Sure, they might lose some revenue by publishing this stuff, but if everyone knows that UofQ has the best online computer science resources, they'll probably draw a better class of undergrad applicants in the process.
In all, this stuff strikes me as VERY forward thinking. Of course, it might flop, backfire, or crash & burn, but we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I think this will be substantially advantageous for the schools that participate. (MIT really doesn't need to boost its glory, methinks, but it is a great project for them to pioneer. The bulk of the advantage will probably go to lesser reknowned schools.)
No matter how much you may feel sometimes that your University is being run like a business (which is pretty much necessary nowadays, with cutbacks to funding), Universitys never have been, nor hopefully will they ever be, out to make a profit. They are publicly funded institutions whose sole purpose is to provide an avenue to educate and teach the public, and hopefully, increase the scientific knowledge of the country as a whole. Any school who cares about nothing but the bottom line is doing a disservice not only to its students but to the community it serves, who in the end, funds its very existance.
This is the main thing that distinguishes a University from a private school, which is out to make a profit, often at the expensive of a good education.
That being said, I feel a bit cheated because I recently took a bunch of online courses from Columbia University. At about $1000/credit, it kinda bothers me that people can get something similar for free (of course, you can't get a degree this way).
Yes, because education should only be available to those with money. I've got news for you, you are paying ONLY for the degree. All of that education is available for free and rightly so. Honestly, would you without something you learned in school from someone who never went, simply because they didn't pay for it? What's more, most universities recieve public funding. So the general public has a right to access that information.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Tuition isn't really related to the university's costs in any concrete sense. Consider the concept of need-based financial aid: one way to look at it is that schools are nobly helping students who can't afford to pay, but another, more accurate version is that they are simply taking all your money (if you're not rich) or as much as they think they can get away with (if you are). Here, read this.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Universities have already been "freely giving away information". The "publish or perish" mantra is not just a saying. If a professor doesn't publish enough papers, he doesn't get promoted and doesn't advance. If a University doesn't publish enough papers, it doesn't get its accreditation renewed. And if a particularly good University doesn't publish an insanely high number of papers; it starts losing its top academic ranking.
If you want to go to a University that is good at making money, go to a school with a good football team. Me, I'll stick to school with a good academic reputation.