Slashdot Mirror
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
Now professors can be like the students and copy all of their material from the web!
Well does this mean that I can add imaginary degree from Cornell and MIT to my resume?
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...
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 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!"
University of Phoenix be afraid...be very, very afraid...
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 am very glad to hear the University of Toronto will be included. Provided the archive is complete, I will be able to review material I was supposed to have learned in the first place!
Grad 9T3
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
or about 7 students' tuition.
While I think it's really great that MIT are putting their course materials online, I'd prefer to be able to study at MIT.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Now I won't have to buy books for next quarter.
At my university, we use Blackboard.
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
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
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.
Also, I have a personal favorite for microfiction online, now that Michael Swanwick is writing a story for every element in the periodic table.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
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."
"And just who... {} 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.??"
Well, for a start, MIT may choose to use a portion of their $1.5 Billion dollar fund raised from alumni, there's a source:
MIT Fund
Another reason why this is a sweet decision on MIT's part is that this (hopefully) opens up a lot of the interesting courses at the school. Part of the inspiration for the Web content caching company Akamai was a course at MIT that I would love to see. Unfortunately, I don't have the money, citizenship, or an admission offer from MIT's Computer Science program to do a degree at the school. But if they put it online, I can at least look at the course curriculum and buy any text or print off the notes and learn the material as best I can.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
A quick google search for "david wheeler subroutine" gives this 1947 reference as first result:
l
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/subroutines.htm
with a technical implementation of a subroutine
A search for "grace hopper subroutine" gives as first result:
http://wayne.home.texas.net/~wayne/grace1.html
At about this time, Grace and her colleagues began keeping a notebook containing segments of code that they knew worked. Each subroutine was written in a generic manner so that whenever a programmer needed to perform a certain function that they knew the code had already been written for, they could simply copy it out of the book, into their program.
After the war... (i.e. this happened in 1945 at latest)
So Grace had her idea earlier, but (no disrespect intended), I think this is what we now call copy-paste or to be kinder: templates.