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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)."
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.
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).
All in all, science has always been a collaborative thing, and this should only help collaboration. Hopefully this will turn out to be a great archive of knowledge, kinda like Google, but you don't need to sift through the bullshit.
As for other subjects besides science/math, I don't know or care what this will do for them. They're pretty much a waste of time anyway. Reading is fundamental, but a literary critic is a terrible waste of flesh...
I went to a talk at EDUCAUSE last month by the head of the MIT project. Copyright is one of their toughest problems: how do you make publically available the reams of material that professors want to use in their courses? [1]
Her example was an architecture course that isn't listed on OpenCourseware. IIRC, it has something like 800 images on the private MIT website for the class. Every single one of those images has to be cleared before putting the site up for the public: she said they've done about 680 so far. Many of the images can't be published: the owner simply won't allow it, so you have to find some other source or simply drop it from the site.
"The system doesn't scale" was the basic conclusion. They have a small group of people doing nothing else. I can't imagine they are paying them enough.
[1] Most of this material is, to be blunt, pirated. (I'm speaking as an instructional tech guy here: I have to deal with these issues.) Faculty will happy scan entire books worth of art, digitize huge tracts of books and in one notable case last year, actually *making multiple photocopies of an entire textbook.* We deal with it by sticking our heads in the sand and blocking anyone outside of our school from seeing it, as do most schools, but I pity MIT: they actually have to sort through the mess.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Once you see the software and mindset involved with these online repositories you will see that these systems are not all that impressive.
Their goal was and is both grand and admirable, but they have missed the mark and the management software and interface falls short.
The infrastructure however appears to be superb. I am just deeply bothered that nothing new has been made or even offered. DSpace is like a stripped down SourceForge made to think like a library card catalog.
10 points for concept
0 points for show
The Engineering school that I just graduated from cannot even manage to get a website representing itself properly. Want to look up the syllabus for EECE 519? Oh, too bad... there is not (and has never been) a web page for that course. The Universities here in Kansas are trying to fight over funds to turn the air conditioners on in the Computer Labs... Much less spending $100k+ on these cool projects. I look on in awe...
Carleton University does this. Some courses have some generic info on the professor's personal webpage, while others have detailed schedules and assignments (including assignments and solutions from years past). The level of this varies from prof to prof as some are not the most computer litterate.
An example of everything online is my "Problem solving and Computers for Engineers" class. The course site is here. A somewhat less helpful site is my mechanics prof's site, here.
However, some of my classes use WebCT (should be familiar to at least some students out there) to post course materials, as well as some grades and for some testing. However, the TAs and both professors have made comments that they really don't like the system because it is too hard to upload files and make changes. Has I have known that all this info was availible online when I was applying to university programs, it probably would have helped me out a bit in choosing programs.
Check out the LAMPADAS project @ http://www.lampadas.org/index.html But DSPACE concept pretty cool. I have been trying to design something like that using Cocoon and PHP
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I like that there's an inherent understanding that there's an ongoing cost above and beyond just sticking some prof's powerpoint slides on a server. I guess that's another sign of a top notch institution like MIT - a commitment to the administrative and finacial costs of something like this to back up the investment in factulty and research.
Makes me that much more wistful that I didn't keep my grades up in high school to make it into the front door. SIGH I guess I should just blame Gary Gygax.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
OpenCourseWare is MIT's initiative to share course materials via the web. Dspace is an attempt to solve the long-term storage problems associated with born-digital research materials.
It will be possible to put things into a Dspace archive that will not be accessible to certain people; OCW materials are by nature meant to be universally accessible.
You can take MIT courses online! They are one of approx 50 member colleges of the online "National Technological University".
:
NTU courses are expensive.
I would like to see a "cottage industry" of tutoring and testing (with "certifications") that uses the MIT OpenCourseWare, and the open publishing from the other schools mentioned. As we have seen in this thread these materials were expensive to develop or accumulate. They represent an immense value entering the public forum.
Any thoughts on how the open community can put together its own classes and tests using OpenCourseWare?
I have been happy to find whatever I can from Cisco, MS, Informit, and any other site with free information and articles when I need to get a job done. I am certain I do more research online when I'm having trouble studying for a certification than I do reading the books or self-study material - plus I can switch right into computer lab mode and work the solution and see what it is I'm doing. Freely available (and no cost) study information is not only great for the students taking these courses - imagine how much less their credit card bills will be at the end of their college terms! - but for folks like me who can't afford [time OR tuition for] that education and rely on experience and willpower to thrive - especially in today's economy .
I would like to see this sort of thing help less financially fortunate students - and adults - obtain the knowledge they want or need to apply to a given situation. Like many adult degree programs maybe this could be a great springboard to reduce the number of actual 'live' classes and help folks "CLEP out" of certain areas or apply some of these towards credits in their degree program by testing for them. Rather than reduce the number of students in classrooms and affect the bottom line of a school; I feel that this may encourage more people to get the education they want and thus end up putting more people into that school over the long term.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
I currently attend one of these fine institutions. I am excited that my school will be listing course material to the entire internet. I am just a bit puzzled by what we will be adding. Most of the courses I have taken don't have any material online. I only know of two courses that have material that anyone not in the class would find interesting. Of the classes that have anything online, most just publish the syllabus and assignments (generally from the textbook). I can only think of two classes that have actual material that could be of any use. Futhermore, one of those classes has so much material copyrighted that it could never be publicized. The intent of this is great, but first the content must be available online for the students.
Greedy, Morally-Corrupt, Thoughtless, Wasteful Bastards in the Biology/Life Sciences dept at University of Oregon in Eugene are charging $33 photocopies of crappy hand drawn molecules and chicken scratch notes.
... "I paid $32.90 for this?!?!" Then I calculated, at 5 cents a page (which is more than reasonable), 113 copied pages (b/w) should cost no more than $5.65. The disparity in cost between what I (a minimum wage earning undergraduate student) am REQUIRED to PAY vs. what is REASONABLE is nothing less than astounding and arguably morally reprehensible.
... what else are we paying for in our tuition and fees?
... this is sad...) If this is the case, please forward my message to those responsible.
... it would not be hard to report this to other parties which may draw due attention to the issue. At the very least, as a temporary measure... give some justification to the students who are probably and quite rightly asking themselves, "why did I pay so much for this?".
Has anyone else noticed this tragedy going on at their local colleges and universities? It's f**in' putting a pricetag on knowledge!
Here's my letter to the Prof. Karen Sprague:
To whom it may concern,
I apologize in advance if you are not accountable for the issue which I raise in this e-mail. I don't know who else to send it to... so here goes.
I am a student in your Bio class. I am writing this e-mail to express my extreme frustration in regards to the lecture notes which are *required* class materials. I was STRUCK tonight when opening the plastic packaging to find nothing more than 113 pages of handwritten drawings and notes.
My first thought was
I urge, no - *BEG* you to consider more affordable solutions to reproducing these lecture notes. (university copying service, scan to pdf version and make available for download) Why, on earth, should students have to pay so much money for something that they have received for *FREE* in other situations? After all
Again - I warmly apologize if you are not responsible for the unfair pricing of the lecture notes. (pricing of *lecture notes*
The reality is that I have no choice in this situation. I must pay... But I refuse to pay without shedding some light on what I see to be a real injustice to students. If nothing is ultimately done
Anonymous
...the University of Chicago has offered online resources for a few years now, mostly in the form of "electronic reserve" readings. Obviously, they don't provide too *many* (as that would eat into the profits of their own University of Chicago press), but it does seem like the era of $100 course packets is largely over for most classes.