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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
Now professors can be like the students and copy all of their material from the web!
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 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
No. You cannot download degrees. However, for 49.95 we will mail you your very own, degree from an accredited university. Act Now and you will receive masters at half price!
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?
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.
That's okay -- i'm of Norman decent and I consider Cambridge and Oxford to be 'one of ours' as well.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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