MIT Everyware

TeachingMachines writes "David Diamond has written a very readable article at Wired News titled MIT Everyware that follows up on MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative (previous story). It turns out that one of the most popular courses has been '6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering, Fall 2001.' Diamond notes that '[u]ltimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses.'"

Comments

Amazing CS is still popular

[Anonymous Coward]

because we all know the bubble has burst and programming is being shipped out to India / China as fast as the MBA's can, sillicon valley is a mere shell of what it used to be so
you would of thought Law would be the popular subject seeing as that seems to be an expanding industry in USA

Re:Amazing CS is still popular

[Wvyern]

I have 2 former employees who have changed careers within the last 6 months, they are in law school. Signed - Just another IT Manager

Re:Amazing CS is still popular

[LinuxJavaman]

People around here can not take a joke? Need a humor check. It was a joke.

Re:Amazing CS is still popular

[Anonymous Coward]

MIT students don't have trouble getting jobs.

Re:Amazing CS is still popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it is--all the students are from India and China too. Who else is motivated enough to get an education online?

Good Project

[Kronos666]

Well, this is a pretty good idea for people who don't have time, or even, the transportation for university. Of course, there will probably be debates to see if these courses will be admissible for diploma...

Re:Good Project

[ScottGant]

So far though, there are very very very few complete courses on OpenCourseWare.

When I say complete courses, I mean complete with lecture notes, assignments, readings, and most importantly the video of the actual class lectures.

Just having the lecture notes...basically just PDF's that outline very very briefly what was covered that day, isn't really the same as taking the course.

Also, MIT states plainly this site is just for information and one can NOT get a degree or credits for viewing this info. But the courses that have video lectures...like the Linear Algebra course...are excellent to brush up on the subject.

I just wish they had more video lectures like Linear Algebra or 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism. But I also understand that it's a tremendous effort to get this all on Web...AND be totally free.

I think more content goes online in Sept. though, according to all their timelines on the site.

I totally applaud MIT and this monumental excercise. Bravo!!

Re:Good Project

[IanA]

All this success has bred a few problems. For starters: profiteering. I show Margulies an email from Thailand. "A group of us here are considering opening a University devoted solely to 'e-learning courses from MIT!'" writes the sender, who says he hopes to offer "Bachelor of Science degrees in MIT Studies."

"He can't do that!" she shrieks.

Soon, the budding entrepreneur is sent a stern reply stating the guidelines: People are free to use, modify, translate, and distribute OpenCourseWare as long as they don't try to make a buck from it.

Read the article? There is no debate, the answer is no.

Re:Good Project

[s88]

"Of course, there will probably be debates to see if these courses will be admissible for diploma..."

Probably only between people such as yourself that have not read any of the FAQs:

"MIT OCW is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses. Rather, the goal is to provide the content that supports an education."

About 1/3 of the FAQs there plainly state that this is just the publishable material of the course; not at all a replacement for taking the course, and in no way is admissible for a diploma.

If you've ever attended college and skipped a class, you should know there is absolutely no comparison between being in class and reading the notes on the web later. That being said, I think this is a great idea, and hopefully people will use it for its intended purpose.

Scott

Re:Good Project

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever attended college and skipped a class, you should know there is absolutely no comparison between being in class and reading the notes on the web later.

None at all. For example, it's much easier to stay awake while reading the notes later, you can take them at your own pace while looking up supplementary sources, you have time to check proofs your own way and you don't have to struggle to read your own rushed handwriting.

Re:Good Project

[misterpies]

>>If you've ever attended college and skipped a class, you should know there is absolutely no comparison between being in class and reading the notes on the web later.

You're right. That's why I never went to class.

Re:Good Project

[aeoo]

If you've ever attended college and skipped a class, you should know there is absolutely no comparison between being in class and reading the notes on the web later.

I beg to differ. There is hardly any difference because:

1) There is almost never a need to ask questions. Most people understand right away what is being taught, and if they don't, professor is not going to stop an entire class for 2 hours so that 2 people can finally get it. Yes, you can ask after class, but then you're not talking about class attendance, but rather one on one tutoring (which is far, far, far more effective than learning in a class setting). It's called a lecture for a reason, and "to lecture someone" carries a negative connotation.

2) In many modern, famous, great Universities class sizes run into 100's of students (700 is not unusual). Everyone sits in an auditorium and listens. You might as well buy a "book on tape". Yes, I know, by the time you reach your 4th year, and M.S., the class size decreases, but that doesn't excuse a charade that happens before then.

3) At times professor may have such a nasty, thick foreign accent, that you can't understand a single word anyway. This observation comes to you from an ESL person. I think if a person doesn't put the effort and time into getting a decent pronunciation and a good English speaking skill they need to be fired. Unfortunately that isn't the case. Again, may I remind you, I'm not a native English speaker and yet I say this anyway. This actually happened to me in one of the most difficult classes I took.

And lastly, I've yet to find a single topic where a well written book didn't do quite nicely. The only thing I can think of that University instruction is good for, is for stuff that is not yet published. Everything that is researched usually will be (and should be) published very quickly. As far as instruction goes, that's the only thing. Univesity is good for active research where you need a lab and some science-minded (as opposed to profit-minded) colleagues to work effectively. Research is not the same thing as instruction.

Re:Good Project

[God! Awful 2]

From what I remember, you can learn everything you would *want* to know about a course just by reading a book. What you often can't learn is what you *need* to know (i.e. what's going to be on the exam).

-a

Re:Good Project

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFL!

Plenty of students skip classes on computer courses. Computer Science courses are tailor made for such activities as many have extensive well developed online support. An intelligent student involved in this programme could be just as competant a computer programmer as a recent graduate on a computer science course.

If anything the proficiency of the open source community (rather sweeping statement admittedly) and the number of people contributing to it is a testement to that. money, and mistakes, often lock people out of 'prestigious' universities, not talent, as is the nature of life. I'm all for their notes appearing online, and only wish the the universities would award diplomas to thsoe that can pass the exam, rather than those wwho have the money to enroll at the uni, or bum the lecturers.

Re:Good Project

[rgremill]

If you've ever attended college and skipped a class, you should know there is absolutely no comparison between being in class and reading the notes on the web later.

In my day, we had no stinking web to read the notes from. If we wanted the notes we had to go to class. ;-)

Re:Good Project

[HeyLaughingBoy]

From what I remember, you can learn everything you would *want* to know about a course just by reading a book

Only for the mind-numbingly boring classes. I'm not arguing with you: I realize that many of these exist. But there are courses taught by excellent professors that you need to be present to get most of, because the instructor brings his experience to bear on the class. It's one thing to read about noise and bandwidth issues in communications wiring in a book; it adds a considerable depth when the professor tells you why he used fiberoptic cables in his space shuttle project.

Re:Good Project

[ChaosDiscord]

If you've ever attended college and skipped a class, you should know there is absolutely no comparison between being in class and reading the notes on the web later.

Absolutely! In many of my classes my time was more efficiently spend skipping class and reading the online notes.

Re:Good Project

[s88]

Apparently your professors posted much better notes than mine... and the MIT OCW professors as well for that matter.

There is always information missing from the notes.

Online communities?

[CausticWindow]

This will come in handy when Slashdot 101 launches.

If you fp, you get the pretty girl on the first row!

Re:Online communities?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a pretty girl actually signed up for Slashdot 101, and was excited enough to grab a seat on the front row, she would be either the most desirable woman on Earth, or some sort of freak. Possibly both.

Either way, it should require at least three sequential fp's just to get her phone number.

SCO Takes Credit For MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

As Spokesperson for SCO I would like to state how proud we are to be responsible for MIT. All of MIT. we have a team at MIT doing some great work. Well, we have a team of MIT people who aren't completely involved with MIT anymore. Alright some of them are dead. OK, OK, we picked up some dead people with the same name as some people who once walked by MIT.

But it's a great team, really.

Something to keep in mind.

[fuzzix]

You may have completed the material but that doesn't mean you can stick 'MIT degree!!' on your Curriculum Vitae.
I'm reading Laboratory in Software Engineering myself, but only because it's interesting - it will probably prove of little benefit in the marketplace.
Still, an excellent initiative - while other universities are milking every cent they can MIT are actually promoting an interest in learning and sharing of information. Excellent stuff.

Re:Something to keep in mind.

[danila]

There is a difference between reading it only because it's interesting and completing the material. If you have sufficient motivation, you can easily get much more from these materials than you can ever get from actual courses in most universities. Of course, whether you will know as much as MIT graduates is debatable. MIT argues that this is no replacement for actually attending their institute, but that surely depends on people. If you have motivation, you can easily get better than some of MIT graduates who took the same course. And in most cases (if you actually study and not just read it for fun) you will be better than graduates in ordinary (crappy) schools everywhere in the world.

Re:Something to keep in mind.

[Reverberant]

while other universities are milking every cent they can MIT are actually promoting an interest in learning and sharing of information.

Trust me when I say that MIT is milking every cent they can get their hands on. It was a great experience, but "altruistic" is not a word I would associate with MIT.

Re:Something to keep in mind.

[iabervon]

6.170 is a team course; a substantial part of the point is that it is more work than one person can do in a term, so you will have to work successfully with other students. So if you want to replicate the experience outside of MIT, you'll want to find 2-3 like-minded friends when you try it. Of course, you could do it when you had 3-4 times as much time to spend on it as a student taking a full courseload, but then you'd be missing half of the point: good design means that other people will be able to make productive use of your code.

Re:Something to keep in mind.

[danila]

That's one course. There are 700 course currently available. Surely there are some where individual work is enough. I am not trying to say that visiting MIT physically + having access to online materials is the same as only having access to online materials. My point is that quite often individual distant learning is much more effective than visiting a real school, especially if you can't come to MIT and have to settle for whatever crappy school is nearby.

Re:Something to keep in mind.

[iabervon]

Certainly a motivated student can do better with a set of good coursework and no school than with a lousy course (or, more likely, a program that doesn't have a course that applies).

I just wanted to point out that courses often have a substantial component that isn't purely information, which would need to be provided locally for the course to really work at all. I actually feel that MIT's coursework isn't necessarily better than other schools; what makes MIT work is that the students have access to really smart and experienced people, as course staff, as other students in the class, and as students who have taken the class before. This means that MIT's coursework can be somewhat more advanced and still be possible.

My somewhat cynical guess is that the courses with information online are mostly courses which rely somewhat heavily on things other than the coursework.

It would be interesting to try to replicate MIT courses online with a group of other motivated students at your local school, and, potentially, some sort of group communication with students in other places doing the course at the same time. I think that adding local or online resources to the MIT coursework would be much more effective than trying to do the MIT coursework individually.

Re:Something to keep in mind.

[danila]

As one of the articles mentions, the materials include audio and video lectures. What else do you need? :) In most schools worldwide you just sit in the lecture-hall and listen to the professor. In developed countries you just sit and listen (and doodle or make some random notes), in developing countries you have to write down everything...

Group work is the only thing missing from MIT materials and it is not the most important thing, since it is usually also missing in most other schools.

improvements based on community response

[stonebeat.org]

success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses.
However I also think the success depends on improvement to the courses based on the community response.
Isn't this the philosophy all open-source, open-standard etc are based on?

Online Courses...

[FileNotFound]

Online courses only really work in cases where people are highly driven or very short on time. As in medical school etc.

Generaly the problem is that it's too easy to 'disconnect' from class and never open the book or do the homework as the web lectures and forum based discussions don't create the same level of attachment and group learning as class.

I'm currently a college student and I have taken a web based class this term and the first few weeks adjusting to it was tough. I kept forgetting to check the boards, to post replies etc. Since you get graded on the level of discussion on the boards etc...first few weeks sucked.

It's very nice though to have all the slides available 24/7 online, even ones from classes taught by other profs. Even better if they post last years tests 8-)

Re:Online Courses...

[doinky]

Oh, come on; how many of us had some classes in real physical college where we rarely showed up for class, and yet did the work and got an A? Well, how many of us here on Slashdot, anyways?

Re:Online Courses...

[Moeses]

I recently went back to school and finished my degree at RIT taking almost all of my classes online through their distance learning program. Since I never felt much of a 'connection' with a physically present class in the first place I found this arrangment much closer to my ideal learning format than having to drive to class everyday, get there ontime, etc.

I loved that I could do the bulk of my work after mid-night (I was working during the day). The key to making the class happen is having a responsive teacher who knows how to use the tools. There were problems when teachers I knew didn't undstand how to use the software to present and organize the class, that was mayhem.

In 2 seperate occaisions professors of mine had parents get sick and then pass away during the class. This caused a great deal of turmoil in the class as it took over a week in each case before the class knew what was going on and why the professor had suddenly dissapeared. In each case though professors showed great dedication to seeing the class through, which I really appreciated. They went above and beyond what I think you might expect from someone in those situations.

Re:Online Courses...

[calebtucker]

Haha, last semester I did this in 'Formal Languages and Automata'. I showed up to class every day for about the first month and made a high C on the first test.

I then started only going on Fridays only (quiz day), and I started making As.

I ended up with 14 absences and a final grade of an A. One of my proudest moments.

Online U.

[cheesekeeper]

Online communities to support the university, eh?

Party tonight at 65.215.9.11!!! OPEN PROXY! FREE SOFTWARE KEG!

This is the future of online college.

The Top 10 list

[I don't want to spen]

Here's the Top 10 from the lists

Top 10 OpenCourseWare Nations*
Rank Nation Hits

1. Canada 3,886,197

2. Germany 3,576,071

3. Brazil 3,170,362

4. South Korea 3,254,259

5. France 3,012,102

6. Japan 3,095,913

7. United Kingdom 3,099,713

8. China 2,563,446

9. India 2,512,267

10. Australia 1,372,052
* Outside the U.S.
Includes nearly 600,000 hits from mainland China, where the government denied access to OpenCourseWare until February 2003, and nearly 2 million hits from Hong Kong.

Top 10 OpenCourseWare Classes

1. Philosophy 24.00: Problems of Philosophy

2. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.170: Laboratory in Software Engineering

3. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.071: Introduction to Electronics

4. Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences 12.409: Hands-On Astronomy: Observing Stars and Planets

5. Mathematics 18.06: Linear Algebra

6. Mathematics 18.013A: Calculus with Applications

7. Nuclear Engineering 22.00J: Introduction to Modeling and Simulation

8. Physics 8.02: Electricity and Magnetism

9. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.281J: Logistical and Transportation Planning Methods

10. Management 15.810: Introduction to Marketing

Nice to see that the 'Other Nations' are outside the US. And I'm glad its South (not North) Korea at No. 4, considering that Nuclear Engineering is at No. 7!

Re:The Top 10 list

[immel]

Notice that electrical engineering is #2. North Korea needs some more electrical engineers. This will help bring that nation out of the darkness (literally). Have you ever seen a satellite photo of the Korean peninsula? The city lights stop at the 38th parallel. Unfortunately, the North Korean government denies access to nearly all electronic communications (even their TVs are made not to recieve communications broadcast outside the country), so higher learning by OpenCourseWare is unavalible to their people.

Re:The Top 10 list

[Sediyama]

# 3. Brazil 3,170,362 # 4. South Korea 3,254,259 # 5. France 3,012,102 # 6. Japan 3,095,913 There is more hits from South Korea than Brazil and more hits from Japan than France.

Re:Question About Brazil ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, this is the mayor of Rio here.
Thanks for the tip, buddy. With you I hope we'll build a great nation, with a strong economy based on the exportation of our delicious guarana-based soft drinks.
By the way, did you ever visited my city, didyou tasted the street on the border of the beach?
Yummy, isn't it? Miium!

This idea is genius.

[HanzoSan]

I hope it really takes off, but what if its alittle bit too successful? What MIT does not understand is, if their courses teach alittle too well or the community grows alittle too large there might not be a need to actually pay MIT to take classes there besides the name recognition.

This is the point I'm making, could this be MIT's suicide? Sure its nice of them and I plan to take full advantage of any knowledge they are willing to put out there, but the more knowledge they put out there the less valueable they become.

Re:This idea is genius.

[Anonymous Coward]

IF you dont pay the little money to MIT, MIT will NOT give you the KnowledgeLicence(tm) you need in order to prove to your future masters that you are a fucking domesticated sheep.

Re:This idea is genius.

[schiefaw]

What MIT does not understand is, if their courses teach alittle too well or the community grows alittle too large there might not be a need to actually pay MIT to take classes there besides the name recognition.

I am pretty sure that someone with a degree from MIT will do better at a job interview than someone claiming to have read though the course. Sometimes, the paper counts!

Re:This idea is genius.

[Jooly Rodney]

The "value" in attending an institution of higher learning has never been in the "knowledge they are willing to put out there," which is usually available in the form of a used textbook on eBay for about $40, it's in the facilities and people that help you absorb said knowledge.

If you've got the sponge-like mind and steel-like self-discipline to learn and practice straight from the textbook, more power to you, but most people don't.

Re:This idea is genius.

[aeoo]

That's called altruism and it's always been at the heart of science.

It always bothered me that actual knowledge is pretty worthless in getting job interviews, but rather your charm (personal and on resume) and "paper degree" is what counts. Maybe if University degrees lost their prestige, genuine knowledge and education (as opposed to mere credentials) would become more important.

Yea, and don't even try to tell me "but you need that University given knowledge *after* you get hired" bullsh*t. Most graduates (even M.S.) in my experience write awful code, have no clue about software engineering principles, and survival is all they do, often unwilling to even get excited by computing.

This problem is going to keep happening as long as we have idiotic H.R. and so-called "head hunters" filtering people out without any knowledge of the field they are hiring for!

Re:This idea is genius.

[jfw25]

The basic facts taught in an MIT class are generally the same basic facts taught in any reasonably competant university; perhaps you'll get more stuff crammed in you per unit time because they assume the students are sharper than average, perhaps you'll get slightly fresher basic facts when (for example) you take an algorithms course from Ron Rivest, but on balance the material you'll find in the course notes is the same. The real reason people want to go to MIT is what you do in between classes, and the stuff which isn't in the course notes. You study with some of the brightest students on the planet, you do grunt labwork for some of the most cutting-edge researchers on the planet, and the idle musings (when a lecture runs a bit short) of someone like Rivest are priceless.

Go ahead and learn all you can from all the courses MIT puts on the web, please! Don't worry about MIT; the more knowledge they put out, the more valuable they'll become. (Now if only they had the notes for the Systems Engineering subject, what was its number.....)

MIT '82 (8 and 6-3)

Re:This idea is genius.

[akajerry]

I don't think MIT has much to worry about. I went to MIT and I did 60% of my learning outside the formal class structure. Any universities in the world could replicate the MIT courseware, but that doesn't replicate MIT. Throughout history the great universities have mainly been concentrations of people, skills and equipement around particular academic areas. The size and quality of that concentration is what differenciates one university from another, not the courseware. As long as MIT maintain itself as such a concentration it will continue to attract people seeking to learn in the best environment available.

Re:This idea is genius.

[danila]

I haven't read MIT financials, but I guess they can survive on donations alone. If it turns out that traditional offline education model is obsolete and everyone and their cat is "attending" MIT virtually, then thousands of rich MIT graduates will stand in line to give their money to MIT. And we are talking about million dollar donations here.

The only thing MIT had to worry about was becoming obsolete as other universities were becoming as good or better in teaching. It looks like they solved that problem already, even before it appeared. :)

Re:This idea is genius.

[danila]

That's precisely the attitude that Richard Feynman had when he graduated from MIT.

When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said, "We won't let you in here."

I said, "What?"

Slater said, "Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?"

"Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."

"You think that?"

"Yeah."

"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."

("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard P. Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton)

Re:This idea is genius.

[misterpies]

Don't be silly. People don't go to MIT to get an education. They go to drink beer and get laid...no, wait. That must have been some other college I was thinking of.

Oh yes, I remember now. They go to MIT in order to assemble police cars on the roof. Seriously, if you think college is all about classes, you missed out on your education.

Re:This idea is genius.

[Mostly a lurker]

Ultimately, the success of any institute of learning and research is significantly influenced by its reputation. Student fees, btw, are not the only (or, with such an institution as MIT, even the main) form of income. MIT, justly, has about the best reputation in the world in its core subjects. MIT will, justly, only reinforce its image as a pillar of the scientific community as a result of this initiative.

Re:This idea is genius.

[HanzoSan]

MIT is all about classes, its MIT, its not a normal school.

Try going to MIT and goofing off and see how long you last there.

Re:This idea is genius.

[misterpies]

actually, I did. Well OK, technically I was attending a little-known school at the other end of Mass Ave but I took MIT classes, had an MIT supervisor and an MIT office. You're right, MIT is not a normal school, but not because it's all about classes -- more because outside classes the students spend their time coding or in the machine shop building things.

Re:This idea is genius.

[HanzoSan]

ah so you actually go to school inn the same area as me, in the same state.

Well, the students spend so much time working outside of class because the classes are a bit more demanding than your typical class. It is MIT by the way so a person has to be in great mental condition to be successful in such a high stress environment.

I mean how many people do you know, who are smart enough to go to MIT and party their way through without studying? Wouldnt you spend your free time studying if you are at MIT?

Re:This idea is genius.

[delirium of disorder]

Formal education at any level is basically already just a formality. So much information is available online and in print that teaching yourself is often more effective than going to school. If you need access to a community, modern communication can easily link you to hundreds of people that have the same interests and just about any skill level all over the world. School acts as an institution that gives you a paper that says you were complacent enough to follow someone else's structure. Business will still consider that a value, but getting a degree is basically irrelevant to real learning. Degrees are a measure of status, not intelligence or skills. Universities like MIT will continue to provide valuable research available in few other places, but advanced education will happen everywhere.

Nice...

[dook43]

Now I can realize just exactly how dumbed-down and introductory my school's Computer Engineering curriculum is. And they said they wanted to be modeled after MIT...

So why ever go to university?

[HanzoSan]

Yes but why ever go to MIT? Its ridiculously difficult to get into, its ridiculously expensive, and the classes are hard. Why go to MIT if you can get MIT quality education at home?

And if I could get a freakin degree from MIT without actually being an official student, then what effect would this have on the current system?

The current system restricts knowledge to those who can afford it, the interesting thing about this system is its potential to change that and make knowledge free. I fully support free knowledge, but if the education on the web begins to rival and surpass the education you get as a student of MIT, what happens to MIT itself, and the current style of teaching?

If you check out my journal, you can see that I have new ideas for teaching which actually are based on some of the MIT ideas, but my ideas I think apply best on the highschool level (highschool is free for everyone anyway)

On the college level however, people pay for an education, and this is where debate can occur. If its cheaper to get your degree over the web, less time consuming, easier, etc wouldnt more people get degrees?

What would the effect be on everything from the economy, to the current education system be if more people had the knowledge of an engineer, a scientist, etc?

Re:So why ever go to university?

[IanA]

[i]MIT administrators and professors are quick to note that the Web is no substitute for the experience of learning in a top-tier academic setting. "OpenCourseWare is a snapshot of the way a particular subject in a particular discipline was taught at one period in time at MIT," says project director Margulies. "It isn't an MIT education."[/i]

You can't get a MIT degree without attending MIT.

Resume 1: MIT
Resume 2: Community college, but I looked at some of that opencourseware stuff.

Who gets hired? The article talks about what you say, all you have to do is actually read it

Re:So why ever go to university?

[Anonymous Coward]

mixed up bbcode and html, oops.

Re:So why ever go to university?

[tybalt44]

Resume 1: MIT Resume 2: Community college, but I looked at some of that opencourseware stuff. Who gets hired? The article talks about what you say, all you have to do is actually read it

Who do I hire? I hire the one who seemed to learn more from their experience. I don't care that you have a piece of parchment with "MIT" printed on it. It's going to be harder to learn from the Opencourseware materials than from the courses themselves, but a motivated person (hopefully with some help from an online community) can certainly do it.

Re:So why ever go to university?

[drudd]

why ever go to MIT

Because it's difficult to get into, and the classes are hard (expensive just goes along with that).

When you get a degree from MIT you're getting two things, 1) MIT's brand name recognition, 2) proof that you can work your ass off for a number of years, and stick things out no matter how tough they get.

The name will get you in the door, the work ethic will hopefully get you the job.

Doug

Re:So why ever go to university?

[HanzoSan]

Yes but alot of people have better jobs than MIT grads with just certification! This is the point I'm making, if someone is MIT certified sure its not a degree, but it does prove this person has the same knowledge of an MIT grad. This would be enough to get me to hire the person over the MIT grad in alot of cases because this person will work for slightly cheaper and will have less of an ego, also this person would be self taught which is far more valueable than someone who was trained all their lives by other people.

You'll see what I mean, it will be just like the computer industry, companies want cheap labor not high quality labor, the companies arent going after people with computer science masters degrees, they are going after people who have all these certifications in very specific areas.

Re:So why ever go to university?

[bug506]

The current system restricts knowledge to those who can afford it

I wasn't very rich when I went to MIT at the end of the 90s--I lived in a trailer in rural North Carolina. The thought of paying $30k a year (now $40k a year) was just mind-boggling for me.

But then I waited to find out what the financial aid was, and they are "ridiculously" generous. They have grants and low interest loans for those who are not rich going in.

My fifth year (to get my Master's), I was able to work as a Research Assistant, getting my tuition paid AND a stipend to cover room and board plus a little bit of partying on the side. (And I was by no means the exception on this point; all of my friends had similar deals.)

Fortunately, partly because I went there, I got a good paying job afterward. Now, three years after graduation, I am close to paying off my loans.

So yes, it is expensive... but they are generous if you do not have the money.

(By the way, I feel particularly attached to OCW now... I received two letters asking me to give legal permission to MIT to use a couple of things I did in OCW (a small class project for a history class and an essay assignment I wrote for another class). It didn't even dawn on me that they would need my permission to use work that I did for classes there, since both of these things have been available on the web since I did them. Maybe they are just being nice. :))

Re:So why ever go to university?

[maddskillz]

You might hire the person who seemed to learned the most, unfortuneatly, usually you have to get your resume past the idiots in HR

Re:So why ever go to university?

[Cujo]

It's the hard classes that make the difference. You don't learn all that much from attending a lecture or reading class notes - the real training comes from doing the work outside of class - homework, projects, preparing for test. Believe me; I've tried it both ways, and the hard way works best.

If you wanted to study martial arts, you wouldn't get far by just watching the instructor demonstrate the techniques. If you want to be awesome like your instructor, you must train as he or she did: pain, fatigue, self doubt, more pain, and ultimately mastery. The same goes for engineering.

Re:So why ever go to university?

[Dachannien]

"But then I waited to find out what the financial aid was, and they are "ridiculously" generous. They have grants and low interest loans for those who are not rich going in."

Exactly. The fundamental reason why so many people in inner-city and rural areas (where money is hard to come by) don't go to college is money, and the reason that money is the fundamental reason is because of a public misperception that going to college is impossible without money.

Re:So why ever go to university?

[goodviking]

You'll see what I mean, it will be just like the computer industry, companies want cheap labor not high quality labor, the companies arent going after people with computer science masters degrees, they are going after people who have all these certifications in very specific areas.

I agree, jobs requiring specific skills will be filled by people with those skills at the lowest cost to the companies involved. However, the whole industry will be invented and given life in the first place by people who have the fundamental insight into the world that is only obtained through hard work and knowledge sought. If a MS is just a title recognizing profincency in a limited set of skills, then you're right. If however it's a recognition of the work that someone put into understanding fundamentals, and their ability to solve a diverse range of problems, then there's the difference.

their SE course sucks

[jilles]

It's a nice excercise in object oriented programming though. I've been involved in software engineering education in two universities and this is by far the least realistic course I've seen. Realism is important because otherwise students won't understand what problems await them after they finish their education. You can't teach a student to deal with the pressure of deadlines, irrational behavior from customers, customers with other priorities then you, etc. They have to experience it and be taught how to do better.

Here's how we do it (3rd year bachelor course): we group students into groups of 10, give them a contact person from a local IT company who acts as a customer and provides them with a realistic assignment (usually something that the company actually wants). Then we let them find out the hard way what software engineering is about. They have to negotiate requirements, sign a fictious contract for what they are going to deliver and then meet the terms of the contract. They have to come up with a realistic plan based on the available study points and people (i.e. 1 study points = 40 hours so 4 studypoints for the course and 10 people is quite substantial).

Meanwhile we also give them a decent introduction to software engineering (using Ian Sommerville's book, which is quite comprehensive) and make sure they understand the basics of all relevant development phases. We guide them through requirements engineering, architecture design etc.

Half way through the term after release #1, we shuffle the student groups and let them start a maintenance project on the project's first releases (i.e. you have to maintain somebody else's code with other people than during release #1).

As you can imagine this is a rather stressful period for the students but the remarkable thing is that most of them actually deliver their stuff on time, as agreed in the contract. The companies involved benefit in two ways: they get access to students who have nearly finished their education and if all goes well they get some free development time and maybe even a usable prototype. We've been doing this for a few years now and we are quite pleased with the results.

Re:their SE course sucks

[ccano]

What you're describing is less about learning computer science and programming skills, and more about the business side of things. This is a very useful still to have, but I think the focus of 6.170 is to give students the perspective and skills needed to program correctly. Further in their career (both academic and/or professional), negotiation skills and what not can be taught and melded with the skills learned here.

Yes, the course teaches idealist programming practices -- as I think it should. As a graduate of MIT EECS, and someone that's since been in "the real world," I look back to this course as one of the most helpful and most beneficial. It didn't teach me to deal with my pointed-haired bosses and such, but that's not what I wanted from my MIT education. I can learn that elsewhere. But with this background, I can strive and push the envelope everywhere I work to improve the process.

Re:their SE course sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

are you kidding? you must be kidding.

MIT is number 1 for a reason. how can you say their SE course sucks? have you been to MIT? have you taken 6.170?

if you did go to MIT you'd know that they don't really try to teach you anything except "how to think outside the box". I went to MIT. Graduated Course VI (Comp sci). I personally cannot remember one thing i learned from any of my courses.

do you know that MIT's comp sci department really doesn't even have a course that teaches a programming language? its just assumed that either you already know an OOP language..or that you can pick it up real quick. i asked hal abelson why they didn't have a course that tought a language and he said, MORE OR LESS, "Any monkey can learn to program, at MIT we teach our engineers how to think. if it takes you longer than a couple of weeks to learn a language then you shouldn't be an engineer."

at first i was put off by that comment...but after i left MIT i grew to love it. its the truth.

if you feel the need to teach your courses with realistic case scenarios....fine by me. but don't dogg MIT because you lack the creativity and mental ability to think outside the box and teach your students to do the same. MIT teaches abstraction and critical thinking. An engineer with those tools is far more prepared to tackle problems than an engineer who learned from one case scenario. no matter how involved it is...it can't prepare them for everything.

MIT has to be doing something right. check out their rankings....then compare them to yours!

Re:their SE course sucks

[Tim Macinta]

Well put. I'd like to add that 6.170 was easily one of the best courses I took at MIT and it helped my programming ability tremendously. While in school, I had jobs on the side and that was more than enough to give me the grounding in reality that the original poster argued should be taught in an SE class. 6.170 covered how to properly design and write software. As you pointed out, how to manage client expectations is definitely an important skill to have, but not something that is fundamentally related to software engineering. If you consider that sort of thing important (and it is), just get a job while you're in school - you can't get any closer to real world experience than that.

Re:their SE course sucks

[Reverberant]

I've been involved in software engineering education in two universities and this is by far the least realistic course I've seen. Realism is important because otherwise students won't understand what problems await them after they finish their education.

The courses offered through OpenCourseWare by no means represent all of the courses offered through MIT. I would actually be surprised if the EECS department didn't offer a course similar to what you described. Certainly you can so similar work through the Media Lab,

In MechE we were required to take a course (2.73) where we were presented with a problem and we where expected to develop an engineering solution to the problem. We were organized into groups of 30 students, given a real budget ($2000/group) and expected to do research and coordinate with industry contacts. So we got to deal with things like late suppliers, unreasonable expectations, prior art, etc.

By the end of the semester, we had to develop a working prototype of our solution, within the budget we were given. Each group then presented this prototype to a group of professors, investors and industry people, and had to demonstrate that the device was feasible to use and mass-produce.

Trust me, you will get real-world experience at MIT

Re:their SE course sucks

[SE_4_EVER]

Jilles,

I would have to agree with you on this. The class is really more a class on object-orientation and object-oriented design, as opposed to software engineering. I think the problem really is that the description and objectives of the class are different from the material covered in the lecture notes.

What I really did not like about the lecuture notes was the fact that their object designs did not follow UML; standards of design are important for engineering for long-term readablility and future maintenance of code, which is where a great deal of the time involved in the software life-cycle is found. No mention of formal specification either, which I myself feel is important, espcially for the understanding of mathematically reliable systems and the bridge between requirements and design.

By the way, the example of the class you gave was a very good one, and I am also a fan of the experiental type of software engineering education. Several of the classes that I have had in Software Engineering have been conducted in this manner, and I found them to be the most realistic and beneficial.

Re:their SE course sucks

[Aix]

I may be wrong, because I was Course VI and have no firsthand knowledge, but I think this is now 2.009, with groups of 10-12 and a budget more like $10,000. They build some pretty killer stuff in that class, on occasion.

Re:their SE course sucks

[SE_4_EVER]

Abelson was right, in a way, because anyone can learn a programming language. The reason that this is applicable is the fact that you teach students logic, not programming. Once the logical flow and implementation of software is understood, the differences between langauges really becomes syntax. For instance, if you know what an object is and how objects interact in their environment, then writing a class specification and implementation in C++ or Ada is really the same, just differnent syntax.

As far as what Jilles said, he is not saying that creativity and mental ability are not needed in engineering, but that practicality must be stressed as well as creativity, and the introduction of real world circumstances as well as creative processes into the same domain is the essence of engineering. Engineering is about delivering a product to a customer, so both are important.

Re:their SE course sucks

[ashultz]

MIT's CS stuff is in general not really big on realism. This course is the closest it gets - they do generally add and remove requirements on you in the middle of the final project. It's also generally not a realistic assignment, but that's okay with me - realistic assignments generally don't include an module that does alpha-beta search on a game space, which was a bit I wrote when I took it.

But really, I've had many years since to get realism. Reality provides it. In large doses. I haven't had so many chances to get a good theoretical underpinning, and I can generally tell someone who has had one (or gone out and built one for themselves) from someone who hasn't. Also, frankly, most software projects don't require much algorithmic thought - databases and hashtables don't really stretch that stuff much - whereas a constructed prolem can.

Your course does sound like a pretty good course, but I imagine it turns a lot of people from CS students into... well, anything else! It's a different course with different objectives from 6.170. You'd probably do best to take both.

Re:their SE course sucks

[obsidian head]

You have chosen to do a "real-world" approach, which is interesting, but you spin it as if it's the only or best approach. Instead, it's one approach, with a set of tradeoffs.

Meanwhile we also give them a decent introduction to software engineering (using Ian Sommerville's book, which is quite comprehensive) and make sure they understand the basics of all relevant development phases. We guide them through requirements engineering, architecture design etc.

This is the part I disagee with. The MIT course doesn't seem to be about "process." Self-proclaimed software engineers have burned programmers with outdated methods like the Waterfall, stolen from completely different engineering disciplines. Instead, the MIT coursenotes talk about design issues. The order of things like requirements gathering is left up to the engineer because there isn't enough timeless knowledge yet to force students early in their lives into modes of thinking.

Re:their SE course sucks

[Reverberant]

I may be wrong, because I was Course VI and have no firsthand knowledge, but I think this is now 2.009,

You may be right - they reorganized the MechE curriculum my senior year (2.01, 2.02, 2.20, 2.40 etc got morphed into 2.001, 2.002 etc), and I never really got to know the new courses.

with groups of 10-12 and a budget more like $10,000.

Is that $10,000 per group? Or per class? If it's per group, I'm gonna have to re-evaluate my alum donations...

Re:their SE course sucks

[Aix]

Looking at the 2.009 website it looks like they have $6000 per team (with 16 people per team), so I was overstating the difference. But I don't think the alums are footing the bill. GM, Ford, United Technologies and the Lemelson Foundation sponsor it, according to the site.

Re:their SE course sucks

[jilles]

MIT is indeed a good university with excellent researchers in a number of areas. However, their reputation does not extend to the research field of software engineering where you have to look for them with a candle (well, there are some papers). Being a software engineering researcher I'm reasonably familiar with the usual channels of publication in that research field.

No doubt this course is a fine programming course. All I'm pointing out is that it has little or nothing to do with software engineering. Software engineering has little to do with technique or even the ability to program (even though that is of course a useful skill to have).

If someone is mistaken: I really like MIT's open course ware program. I'd wish more universities would do that. I was just commenting on the contents of what is cited to be its most popular course, which IMHO is labeled incorrectly as a software engineering course.

I have no comments on your remarks regarding my 'creativity'. They say more about you than me.

MIT no doubt deserves the respect you give it. And I'm well aware that they are among the elite of US universities. I just don't blindly swallow information just because of rankings (I actually like thinking out of the box). Carnegy Mellon is the place to be as far as software engineering is concerned IMHO. I myself am from the Netherlands where there are several centuries old universities with excellent reputations.

Re:their SE course sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to MIT. Graduated Course VI (Comp sci).

Me too.

if you did go to MIT you'd know that they don't really try to teach you anything except "how to think outside the box".

I wouldn't put it that way... MIT CS is very, very theoretical, not practical. As you say, they teach you the fundamentals because the specifics change so frequently, and because it's assumed that you can pick them up on your own. It's a great place to learn how to be a CS professor, but I'm not sure it's a great place to learn how to be a coder - real-word experience was much more helpful for me. In any case, I wouldn't call any of that "thinking outside the box".

MIT has to be doing something right. check out their rankings....then compare them to yours!

In my opinion, MIT is not a top school because it teaches well. It's a top school because they give you so incredibly much work that the people who can't hack it drop out. In general the motivation and skill of teaching at MIT is poor, though there are exceptions as noted in the article. The MIT award for execellence in undergraduate teaching used to be the kiss of death - for like 5 years in a row, the professor that received this award was denied tenure the next year.

Knowledge is power.

[HanzoSan]

When Knowledge is free or easier to access the degree becomes less useful / valueable. What will happen is, someone will offer a certification test and people will take that test and instantly be MIT certified, meaning they have the knowledge level of an MIT graduate and its verified via exams.

This is what the computer industry did, I mean people are getting A+ certified, certified in everything from game development, to C++, to Linux even, so when when this MIT knowledge becomes more of a commodity what effect will it have on the market?

Knowledge is still power, it doesnt even matter where you get it from, sure MIT is a good name, but in the end, certification would be just fine for most.

Re:Knowledge is power.

[caseydk]

You should really try reading the article.

You CANNOT get credit for coursework via this method. You still have to apply, be accepted, and take the class. In addition, you can't make money off it.

Resume #1: Graduated MIT
Resume #2: Certified to have read MIT coursework.

Big difference.

Re:Knowledge is power.

[Minna Kirai]

You CANNOT get credit for coursework via this method.

Duh, he's talking about trends in the near-future. The fact that MIT doesn't currently give credit for non-paying online students is irrelevant.

Someday, the marketplace will drive colleges to split up their student-based revenue into two parellel streams: testing and tutoring.

A person will be able to independently decide whether he wants MIT to educate him about a subject, to certify that he's been educated on it, or both. For quality schools, that certification will often be much more elaborate than a single test event.

To some extent, a student can already choose to get only the tutoring portion and not the testing. This is called "auditing a class". But today, a person who's already so expert in a subject that she can safely skip each lecture and still pass the final has no way to avoid paying for those lecture sessions.

Cost of MIT

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

I recall going to MIT in the early 80's and paying $5-7k per semester (just tuition). I'm surprised to see it hasn't gotten too much higher, about $15k now. Here's a link to the prices, which I found a bit hard to find on their website:

Making MIT Affordable

Alas, I didn't graduate (ran out of money at the time) and don't see a way to get back into it. They don't seem to have any pages targeted at people who want to resume a long-interrupted stay.

Re:Cost of MIT

[inburito]

They can take pretty much anyone once admitted back in! Contact admissions and ask.

I was talking with mit's financial aid and something like this came up. The downside is that you still need your parents income tax returns if you want any support. They mentioned as an example from few years back someone 30+ who was coming back to finish off their bachelors that got interrupted and he still had to go through the same procedure as fresh out of high-school kids to get any financial support. It is a good thing, however, that they can be very flexible and adapt to individual situations in deciding how to support.

Re:Cost of MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was there in late 80's/early 90's, I knew quite a few people who had left for various reasons and came back in their mid-to-late 30's to finish off their degree. It's definately do-able. Most were Course VI.

I also think (regarding another poster) that once you've received your BS, you need to reapply for a 2nd degree. You can get 2 at once, but once you've graduated, you need to reapply for a 2nd BS.

Re:Cost of MIT

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

Well, I'm 40+. What do they do when one is old enough to have no surviving parents with tax returns?

I'm thinking at this point that finishing my degree will end up being part of my retirement plans.

Re:Cost of MIT

[mofochickamo]

Tuition that is $15k per semester really hurts. The MITAffordable.pdf says your yearly budget is $41030. That means when you graduate you could have a student loan somewhere around $160000. That is how much my condo cost when I bought it (worth a lot more now, thanks to California's insane housing market). Does anyone know the difference in average pay between a non MIT CS graduate and an MIT CS graduate?

MIT is, of course, one of the best techonology focused unversities in the world and you get to work with excellent faculty and students. I think, without any supporting facts, that most MIT students have received financial aid (except for the rich ones, who were born with financial aid).

I got my CS degree from the University of California, Irvine campus. It was a good education and it was a very good deal. It cost me 0 dollars to attend. I got a Cal grant because my parents didn't make a lot of money and I had a good GPA. But even without the Cal grant the tuition for the entire 4 years would have cost just over 1 semester's tuition at MIT (though with the current CA budget crisis prices are rising).

Re:Cost of MIT

[Uncle Op]

... is still TDM.

AFAIK, you can always rematriculate to finish. Just pay full tuition (there's a song about tuition) and talk to the current-day equivalent of Ann Chick and the DoSA; perhaps the Office of Career Services? Oh, you want to earn a degree by going part time? Bzzzt. I don't think they are there yet.

It's not unlike a lot of schools and their doctoral programs, though. They want you and your attention full time. It may well help you focus better (though most folk going to school later in life are far more motivated than I, and I daresay you, were at 17-21) and, more cynically, it gives them (particularly the administration, not the faculty) a chance to work on your give-to-MIT brain on a daily basis.

Yeah, I did graduate. In nine semesters. At least they were contiguous. They were hardly smooth, and only sometimes discrete.

Re:Cost of MIT

[inburito]

If you have no surviving parents you need to explain (and possibly prove) this and they will consider your personal wealth only. In my case my parents got divorced when I was very young and I've had no contact with one of them for 15+ years. Even though generally both parents' information is required, they did make an exception in my case and only required one of them to submit.

Good job, guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Wired has only had this in their current issue for the past three weeks. It's good to see that you're on top of things.

Next time I want karma, I'll just flip through my most current issue. You guys reprint every fucking article they have, only weeks later.

North Korean nuclear experts

[GQuon]

Nice to see that the 'Other Nations' are outside the US. And I'm glad its South (not North) Korea at No. 4, considering that Nuclear Engineering is at No. 7!

Those figures are a bit misleading. The North Koreans are taking the course through a FidoNET gateway in South Korea. The link across the border is by an RFC2549 connection.

When will the U.S. learn, and stop educating its enemies?

Re:North Korean nuclear experts

[Rogerborg]

I actually believed you until you spoiled it with the laughable assertion that North Korea have access to the new protocol with QoS rather than the basic RFC1149 transport layer.

Re:North Korean nuclear experts

[GQuon]

the laughable assertion that North Korea have access to the new protocol with QoS rather than the basic RFC1149 transport layer.

Read my comment again before claiming it is wrong. The protocol with QoS is only for communication across the Demarcatition Line.
Inside North Korea itself, the connection relies on the country's antiquated telephone system.
In some rural areas, the students are complaining about the hassle of carrying their computer to the only phone in the village, in the middle of the night, to be available in Zone Mail Hour (ZMH). If they don't, they will be thrown out as nodes.

I think this is wonderful!

[cavemanf16]

I've been looking forward to "taking" some of the MIT classes online to further my own education. As I am currently in school at DeVry due to me working full-time, it's no wonder I'd be excited to be reading class material from MIT. This also will help me study up on the lower level classes like Physics and basic computer engineering topics so I can test out of them at DeVry, thereby speeding up my ability to graduate with a BS finally.

And yes, I do consider this a true "Open Source" initiative, as we would normally have to pay thousands of dollars for such valuable structured training. While I may not get to 'contribute' much to the course per se, I will ultimately be able to contribute my new knowledge towards the general public body of knowledge without paying a company/university to do so. So in the broader sense, I think this is a great thing for open source computing, or otherwise.

I wouldnt say that.

[HanzoSan]

In reality there is very little difference between an online course and an offline course, the difference is with an online course you have to do your own research, so what? This is the internet and it was built for research.

Offline your teacher guides you more, "read book X", "Look at page Y" +lecture+lecture and repeat.

I'm currently a college student and I have taken a web based class this term and the first few weeks adjusting to it was tough. I kept forgetting to check the boards, to post replies etc. Since you get graded on the level of discussion on the boards etc...first few weeks sucked.

I myself have more problems getting to class on time, I forget to wake up in the morning on time, and I forget to go to school, hey am I making any excuses?

Just because you cannot learn without having someone hold your hand does not mean everyone has that problem, just like I'm aware that not everyone has problems getting up early in the morning.

It's very nice though to have all the slides available 24/7 online, even ones from classes taught by other profs. Even better if they post last years tests 8-)


If you get graded for discussion in class how is this any easier? At least on the boards I can spellcheck and give a better more deliberate arguement/debate. When its in realtime its actually more difficult because you cannot take back errors, everyone gets to see/hear them.

I see nothing wrong with online courses depending on the subjects. I wouldnt take online courses to learn science myself, but for certain subjects you can get equal quality education online as you could offline, for learning history, english, philosophy, sociology, psychology, math, etc, youc an do just fine doing it online. Chemistry, and more scientific courses would be better offline where you have the state of the art MIT lab.

Re:I wouldnt say that.

[gobbo]

"for learning history, english, philosophy, sociology, psychology, math, etc, youc an do just fine doing it online."

Woah, there, tiger. English is not a print-only course of study, it is (or should be if it's worth anything) also a verbal activity. You need to hear the shit read out loud now and then, or else you might as well thumb through a phone book. English courses online would be a bit like doing a chem lab with a java app running a simulation: possibly useful to make a minor point, not much good as training.

[...tears out what little hair is left] What the hell is going on in schools? No wonder I get these barely literate university drones to work with!

Computer Science vs. Software Engineering

[Dareth]

I have a degree in Computer Science. I got lots of theory, and what I believed to be a fairly descent education. However, after reading thru the course material for this "Introductory Level" material, I quickly realized that I didn't get quite the education that I had expected. Software design is a single senior level class for CS. Lots of "waterfalls and whirlpools", but little practical knowledge. Yes, theory is great... but I much enjoyed reading thru this material. Just to remind myself that I must never stop learning.

Thats not what I meant.

[HanzoSan]

You can't get a MIT degree without attending MIT.

I was not trying to make the point that you could get a "degree" from MIT. I was saying you can get MIT knowledge and with that knowledge get "MIT certified". Believe me if this becomes popular its only a matter of time before theres MIT+ cerfication or some whole group of certs.


Who gets hired? The article talks about what you say, all you have to do is actually read it

Does the article even mention the fact that certification can get people hired? Its working in the tech industries, people without computer science degrees are getting certified and getting hired, then you have people with computer science degrees who cant find jobs, so yes certification counts.

Re:Thats not what I meant.

[rvega]

And who is going to back your MIT+ certification? MIT? I don't think so -- they already have a certification program, called "degrees".

And who's going to write the exams? You're not seriously suggesting that your MIT+ certifications will just use the exams posted on MIT's site, are you? You can't have the exam questions publicly posted and expect people to not look up the answers beforehand.

So, who's going to write the exams? If it's not MIT, then it's not exactly an MIT certification, is it?

You haven't thought this through much, have you?

Re:Thats not what I meant.

[IanA]

I was not trying to make the point that you could get a "degree" from MIT. I was saying you can get MIT knowledge and with that knowledge get "MIT certified". Believe me if this becomes popular its only a matter of time before theres MIT+ cerfication or some whole group of certs.

MIT+ or anything similar would be an infringement on the MIT name. Furthermore, numerous standardized tests already exist that do what any tests over the MIT OCW would cover (see: GRE, etc.)

Re:Thats not what I meant.

[HanzoSan]

MIT+ or anything similar would be an infringement on the MIT name. Furthermore, numerous standardized tests already exist that do what any tests over the MIT OCW would cover (see: GRE, etc.)

MIT+? Thats not something you could easily prove in court, but still they could name it something else.

Sure theres numerous standardized tests, but that doesnt stop more from being created. You have Cisco, you have Network+, you have Microsofts networking test, and I think Novell might even have one.

Each company wants specific knowledge from their workforce, alot of companies might want a person to have knowledge based on the OCW, and something like IT-OCW+ would be a vague enough name to actually be used as a certiifcation.

Ian Somerville

[mccalli]

Meanwhile we also give them a decent introduction to software engineering (using Ian Sommerville's book, which is quite comprehensive)

I was taught by Ian Somerville - he's an interesting and very realistic person. One of the things he said to us was that in his class, he would tell us why the things we learnt in almost every other class were bad...

This was an exaggeration of course, but his basic point was right. Tightly coupled systems, even techniques such as recursion...not so much a HOWTO as a WHYTO avoid in reality much of what theory states is the most elegant solution.

I didn't take it in at the time, of course. I thought I knew better - that he was only saying things because people weren't good enough to use all these latest techniques that I, in my god-like genius, had mastered completely. Now, ten years later, I remember that attitude when reading code written by the latest graduate intake, someone who's read the Design Patterns book one too many times, or someone who proclaims we should dump all code in language X because language Y is obviously superior.

As your post suggests, Software engineering isn't about coding. It's about technique, and pragmatic technique at that.

Cheers,
Ian

You're misthinking of MIT as a for-profit firm.

[waxmop]

Universities were meant to be centers of learning and education for the betterment of the larger society. People started MIT way back in the mists of time because they wanted to educate their kids and because they recognized that education has external benefits to everyone. The open courseware project is a logical extension of those ideals.

It's a shame, but most universities behave as profit-maximizing firms (hoarding IP, seeking TV contracts and endorsements for sports teams, etc) when that's not really what they were founded to do. If they want to behave like profit-maximizing firms, then they shouldn't ask for donations and they shouldn't get tax revenues.

Projects that work???

[Dareth]

I thought the purpose of Software Engineering courses was to teach entire classes of programmers that failure is always possible!!! Our class was a programming version of the "Kobiashi Maru"

Re:Projects that work???

[jilles]

The whole problem with software engineering in practice is that failure is very likely because many so-called software engineers don't understand their own profession. The better ones learned their trade in practice, not at a university.

The key thing to teach to students about software engineering is that programming is the easy part. Most of our students are very surprised to find out that they can't sit down and hack away from day 1. They first have to figure out what the customer wants and then come up with a realistic plan to build it. Then they find out the clock is ticking and that they actually have to build what they promised they would build.

The MIT course seems to be mainly about programming OO stuff. The requirements are fixed (very unrealistic), the customer is their teacher and the deadlines are planned for them. I'm sure the actual excercise is quite challenging but with the previous elements removed it is more about learning how to program than how to work as a software engineer with other software engineers to complete an assignment for an impatient customer.

MOD DOWN DIDN'T READ ARTICLE

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD DOWN DIDN'T READ ARTICLE

Nuclear reactor engineering?

[Zog The Undeniable]

One of the courses is Nuclear Engineering Course 22.312: Engineering of Nuclear Reactors!

I thought there were laws against exporting this kind of technology? Instead of students from Nepal to Nebraska will be diving into the material, shouldn't the article have read governments from Pyongyang to Islamabad...?

Re:Nuclear reactor engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

so? Let em. You can purchase a textbook on the subject just as easily. The deficit that matters is experienced people--and at this point, that's not a problem. I seriously doubt that it's very hard for any country with the money to produce a nuclear reactor to hire some ex-soviet, chinese, or other specialist.

OpenCourseWare value

[TrekkieGod]

OpenCourseWare is a lot of hype because it has the name "MIT" attached to it. I suggest anyone, especially the people currently posting about how great it is to get a system of education online, to click on the article description link and try browsing a few classes. Virtually every university has about the same content (basically just pdf slides of class lectures) in their class webpages, such as my power electronics class at the university of south carolina.

Now, there are a few courses in OpenCourseWare that have videos of lectures, more organized readings and problem sets...but they're very few. If every course was published in that format, then I'd be impressed...and I don't mean every course MIT teaches, just every course listed in the dang OpenCourseWare site...it's such a waste of time to go, "oooh...this looks like a nice class" only to see that there's nothing in there you can learn from (some of them don't even have pdf lectures, just the syllabus and homework assignements for a textbook you don't have).

Re:OpenCourseWare value

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree! The truth is that far better online lecture materials can be found at Universities like Stanford, Caltech and Berkeley. I have found Stanford's lecture notes to be particularly good - most likely due to Stanford's commitment to their distance learning program. By contrast, many of MIT's so called online courses provide an incomplete set of lecture notes; sometimes in the form of shoddy scans of hand written slides. Makes me wonder where all the money that was pumped into OCW went!?

they're not really the only ones doing this...

[DrEasy]

A lot of courses from a lot universities are already available online, what is new here is that they're trying to do this systematically. Also of course given that this is MIT, the quality of the course material might be superior to others.

Re:MODULATE PARENT DOWN

[BiteMeFanboy]

Silly AC, jokes are for smart people.

Its just like A+, Network+,or any of the others

[HanzoSan]

Companies will sponser the certification, you'll pay to take the exam, the companies have far more power than MIT and will get around the law by simply not profiting off opencourseware itself, but by selling certification.

In the same way I can get certified in Network+ and they dont ask how I learned what I learned or what books I used, its clear that I have to use certain books to get that information and we all know what books those are, if they dont officially endorse anything, well they cannot get in legal trouble.

MIT+ could be the same kinda thing, they just give a test based on the MIT CourseWare, and in order to pass it you must have knowledge in Open Courseware.

Of course because you could have got your knowledge from somewhere else and theres no way to prove it, well they legally have the right to sell certification. You cannot sell certification in C for dummies, or learn C in 24 hours, but you can cell C or C++ certification which requires a person learn that.

And this is the point I'm making, Open Course Ware will simple increase the value of the certification industry while decreasing the value of the degree industry.

Thats what open source Linux is doing, I mean I'm seeing Linux certification right now, but I dont see people getting degrees in Linux, and thats just the point I'm making. The certification exists and theres nothing Linus or anyone can do about it!

Technically thats supposed to be impossible.

[HanzoSan]

Maybe your class graded on a curve or something but how exactly can you have a 90% average if you got a C?

I got a C and got a B, the only reason you got an A is because the teacher liked you alot and most likely would have given you an A even if you only showed up for the final exam.

its called grade inflation, this is when teachers give everyone As just for the hell of it, even when they dont actually have the numbers to back up the grade. Lucky for me, my school doesnt do that, and I hate grades on a curve, if my average grade is 85% in my calculations, thats a B+, therefore I dont expect to see an A if I have an 80 or 85 average.

Of course I'll take the A, I'd just consider it a fluke.

Re:Technically thats supposed to be impossible.

[yerfatma]

[H]ow exactly can you have a 90% average if you got a C?

One C and a bunch of As according to his comment. Check and see if the Math Department has put "Means and Medians in Numeric Theory 104" up yet.

Re:Technically thats supposed to be impossible.

[HanzoSan]

yeah but your AVERAGE is what decides your grade.

Re:Technically thats supposed to be impossible.

[yerfatma]

Am I nuts? Average a bunch of As and one C together with various weights and you can still get an A. If you're saying all As count as .9 and a C is .7 or whatever so that one C prevents you from ever getting over .9 again, you're thinking too hard. Any professor looking at a grade history that goes: C A A A A A A A A A A A A is probably going to give the kid an A.

Re:Technically thats supposed to be impossible.

[calebtucker]

IIRC, the C grade was a 78, and there were 3 other tests not including the final that I got between a 92 and 97 on.

So if you do the math, it ends up being a really low A, but it's still an A :)

We generally don't get to see our final exam grades at my school, so I suspect there might be a bit of inflation going on for final exams. It would be easy for a lazy teacher to glance at the exam and assign a grade based on previous grades. This also helps the class average, which makes a sucky prof who likes to ramble off-topic look good and keep his job (*cough*).

Re:Technically thats supposed to be impossible.

[HanzoSan]

Yes thats exactly why I got a B. Good professors calculate the grade correctly.

I didnt DESERVE an A, so I didnt get one, I deserved a B, I got a B. Sure I got all As and only had a C on one paper, fact is that brought my average down to a B, so I got a B. I did the calculation myself and knew I had a B weeks before the end of class.

Good idea, but waste of time.

[$criptah]

MIT is not the only school in the United States that has online notes. As a matter of fact, most of my classes had some sort of online reference avaliable. The key is that all these lectures notes are not intended to be the primary source of information. They are suppliments that help students to keep track of what has been studied throughout the semester. If you do not believe me, please go to the web site and read through some lecture notes. They represent typical outlines that help teachers in course organization; I really doubt that these notes have significant educational value unless you happen to be a student taking that particular class from the very same teacher.

This kind of online work helped me out big time when I missed classes and had to catch up with my work before the exams: from these class notes I knew what I had to study. However, I doubt that there is a person who can read these notes only and then test out of a course.

Yeah so

[HanzoSan]

Why wont your computer science degree beat out certifications when you are going for a job?

It doesnt matter if you have a degree, they want you to have specialized knowledge not general knowledge and anyone can offer certification and suddenly no one needs an MIT degree, just pull out your certification.

Re:Yeah so

[schiefaw]

You would have a valid point if it wasn't for two things.

One, the courses offered are the same courses offered as part of a degree. So claiming to have taken these courses would only indicate that you have had some of the triaining of the canidate with the degree.

Second, these courses do not offer any kind of certification. So, you have no proof that you ever even attempted the course, much less how your grades were.

It is very nice service for a guy like myself, who has a degree but wants to continue gaining knowlege. But, I don't see it as any threat to an accredited program.

Re:Yeah so

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it ever occur to you that some people who pursue a degree in computer /science/ are looking for a career other than code monkey?

Re:Yeah so

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, unfounded fears.

I went to MIT; and one of the thoughts I had while there was "what makes, if anything, this place special?" -- after all, it's not like we used super-secret textbooks. We used the same textbooks used elsewhere, and presumably learned the same material. In fact, while at grad school at UCLA, I got to meet one of the professors there that wrote the textbook for Heat Transfer we used at MIT: so was I better off taking Heat Transfer as an undergrad at UCLA than MIT?

Look, what made being at MIT unique were the fellow nerds and the nerd-culture there (most people here understand I don't mean nerd in a derogatory way). I met some truly exceptional people there (students), and the geeky culture in general meant that, for instance, some professors would get standing ovations at the end of every lecture (the better ones, of course). It was amazing being surrounded by the sort of students that *applauds* a well thought out or insightful lecture.

I can't imagine this is unique to MIT, but to say that putting stuff online (when all our stuff was already available: we didn't use secret space-man textbooks, the knowledge of which is now barely available to the rest of the world!).

I think your concerns are completely unfounded -- and I'm extremely proud of my alma matter for taking this stand in a) sharing of information and b) being smart enough to realize that this doesn't "water down" the value of attending school there, in fact, I imagine (esp. if the lecture notes posted are of high quality) that MIT's educational "stock" just went up several notches world-wide, the exact opposite of what you suggest.

Try going to public school.

[HanzoSan]

If you've got the sponge-like mind and steel-like self-discipline to learn and practice straight from the textbook, more power to you, but most people don't.

Most people who went to public school DO learn to have a sponge like mind and steel like self discipline to learn straight from the text book, the ones who dont drop out. This is why urban public schools have such a high drop out rate.

Now, if you were smart enough to educate yourself all through public school, by the time you get to college, you already have the skills to do this. The ones you talk about went to private school where classes were small and teachers would give them individual attention.

Re:Try going to public school.

[yerfatma]

Now, if you were smart enough to educate yourself . . .

Guess it depends on your definition of "educated." I think working problems out with other people and seeing their ways of coming to solutions is a huge part of an education. It's easy to sit and read books and consider yourself smarter than the average bear. The hard part is going out and chanllenging your own presumptions. As you become aware of more and more things you don't know, that's when you're getting somewhere.

There is a value in those ivy-covered buildings. Especailly the girls' dorms.

Re:Try going to public school.

[HanzoSan]

Yes but not everyone is given that option. Sure I'm willing to learn WITH other people but most of the time people refuse to go at my pace, or they just arent interested.

I dont know anyone who wants to discuss string theory, or talk about genetic algorithms, its interesting to me but most people think its too geekish and nerdy to talk about.

Even the MIT students I've spoke to dont seem to talk about this stuff to the degree you mention outside of a classroom.

You are right I can learn from other people through discussion, debate, and exchange of ideas, but that cannot happen because most people do not want to exchange ideas. Most people think of school as work, they get out and they want to go party, not talk about science.

I guess most of my friends are the artsy type and not the nerd types who spend their time trying to learn how to create artificial lifeforms or discuss the new research going on with nano technology.

Not to mention unless you have access to a state of the art lab, you cant test any of your theories out. Yes I know you are going to say "Well yeah thats what MIT is for!"

But MIT is very elite, one of the most selective colleges in the country, is it worth it? I am not so sure since most of this research could be done in the private sector.

Re:Try going to public school.

[yerfatma]

I am not so sure since most of this research could be done in the private sector. Suuuurrre. Right after you find a company in that field who has a monetary interest in doing that research. Schools and government fill the gaps where the market will not go without incentive.

Re:Try going to public school.

[HanzoSan]

Absolutely not, schools usually dont research things which dont have potential for profit either. Sure MIT may have the money to research any little thing but the majority of schools use research to help pay their bills.

MIT has been known to do research for the government, and for corporations.

nobility of purpose

[nicodemus05]

I'm currently paying my $42,000 to be an MIT student. There are people discussing whether OCW will make MIT obsolete, or whether it'll be financial suicide for the school. One person commented that it was erroneous to think of MIT as a for profit organization, which is exactly the point that needed to be made.

From the MIT mission statement:

The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges.

It's one thing for a university to say something like that, but what I as a student can contribute to this discussion is the assurance that they're for real. TDespite huge military and government funding there are no secret projects on campus; every research lab is open to every student. Most parts of campus (including the extensive libraries) are even open to the public. Data is posted on the internet as soon as it can be verified... I feel silly listing these individual things MIT does to share information. That's probably because OCW is the single greatest step in that process.

I'm not worried that my degree will be obsolete in 20 years. Other people may have learned the same material organized by the same professors, but the real value of MIT is the interaction with the teachers and the students. It comes with a hefty price tag, of course. Disclaimer: MIT isn't perfect. Every time I've mentioned the school before I've gotten flamed. Flame away. The school isn't perfect, but it does have a particular nobility of purpose.

Re:nobility of purpose

[mofochickamo]

but the real value of MIT is the interaction with the teachers and the students

Not to mention being able to put MIT on your resume or on applications to graduate schools.

Re:nobility of purpose

[webprogrammer]

Hi. I'm currently looking into MIT as an undergraduate, but the few people I've asked (who've looked at it and decided to go somewhere else) say that the atmosphere is so cold / competitive / cut-throat that it renders a solid education unenjoyable. As someone who's actually going there, can you tell me your opinion? Is the name worth the pain? Do you recommend it?

Thanks.

Re:nobility of purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

I would disagree with all three characterizations. I find the students (UG and G) to be generally friendly and helpful to each other. There are, of course, exceptions. The professors are a little bit distant, due to pressure to do research, but this is made up for by the help friends offer to each other.

I lived as a Graduate Resident Tutor (MIT equivalent of an graduate residence advisor) for 4 years, and am currently a graduate student there (to give you an idea where my opinions were formed).

Re:nobility of purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be mistaking MIT for that red brick prep school up the river. MIT is one of the friendliest, most cooperative environments I can imagine. The school does not rank its students and does not offer degrees with honors (ie there is no such thing as graduating at the top of your class and no such thing as magna cum laude.) There's nothing to compete for. Even if there were I think that the students would still band together to help one another. The place is definitely a pressure cooker. It takes an amazing amount of work to succeed, and an atmosphere (deserved or not) of us against the 'tute, sport death, is created. There is a definite camaraderie formed after a study group completes a 9 hour problem set.

Anyway, the point is that while MIT is definitely painful, the pain is in the hard work, not in the people. I absolutely recommend the school.

Re:nobility of purpose

[nicodemus05]

The anonymous coward post that mentions the red brick school was mine. On a public computer. Sorry.

Re:nobility of purpose

[webprogrammer]

Alright, thanks for the opinion. I'll definately give the school some consideration.

You forgot some

[Anonymous Coward]

Haiti (1993-present)
Somalia (1993)
Iraq (1998-1999)

BTW, Yugoslavia is (1999-present), not (1999)

They have more than one Software Engineering cours

[jfw25]

Unfortunately, 6.033 "Computer Systems Engineering" is not (yet) one of the OpenCourseWare subject, which is really sad. At least when I took it, it was much more valuable (to me, anyway) than the lab course 6.170. The first two lectures of 6.033 (then) did not even mention computers, except in passing.

Granted, neither course explicitly covered "irrational behavior from customers, customers with other priorities than you", etc., but you certainly get a reasonably complete picture the the development process out of these two courses (and I can firmly assure you that no MIT student lacks for exposure to "the pressure of deadlines"...).

I should point out that I graduated from MIT 20 years ago, so their engineering courses could well have gone to hell since then. Even MIT's engineering department is subject to the usual fads and fancies of the industry, or even fads and fancies of its own invention: the year after I took 6.170 (using PL/1) they started using a custom-designed language with all of the important software-engineering features built in to it (CLU, which I'm sure you've all heard of...). Even so, the principles are really the important part (I've never used PL/1 since), assuming your students are sharp enough to be taught principles and not rote mechanical repetition...

Just hype

[nnnneedles]

This is just hype ppl.

Every good university has the same thing. This initiative has been talked about so much that I thought MIT would do something really special.

Have you browsed through the classes on their site?

There are just some pdf files there. No listing of the books used, or what you are required to read in them for each class. No forums, no timetable, no nothing.

I mean, it is still great and all, but hardly something that's unique to MIT, or something that works as a course for someone on the outside. All they did was publish the handouts for the students already enrolled.

Oh please lol,

[HanzoSan]

The real reason people want to go to MIT is what you do in between classes, and the stuff which isn't in the course notes. You study with some of the brightest students on the planet, you do grunt labwork for some of the most cutting-edge researchers on the planet, and the idle musings (when a lecture runs a bit short) of someone like Rivest are priceless.

The average person does not care about that stuff, and also theres bright people in every college, the MIT students are the most disciplined students on the planet in most cases, they actually spent time studying and doing their work. The research is better but this only applies to certain programs at MIT, MIT is not the master of all fields.

Go ahead and learn all you can from all the courses MIT puts on the web, please! Don't worry about MIT; the more knowledge they put out, the more valuable they'll become. (Now if only they had the notes for the Systems Engineering subject, what was its number.....)

The more knowledge they put out the less valueable they'll become, when the average joe blow knows what an MIT graduate knows, someone will offer certification, usually a bunch of big companies who want to hire cheap labor for their new biotech lab, so certifications will replace degrees and MIT will be in the same boat as the computer science degrees that people get.

Yes a degree helps but certification and a degree are equal to most employers and in some cases they prefer to hire the person with certifications because that person is self taught, and knows the specific knowledge the job requires. If you are hiring a person for nano technology, a nano technology certification is more valueabble than a general degree from MIT. This is what I'm talking about.

Re:Oh please lol,

[WallsRSolid]

I cannot disagree with your main thrust more.

While there is a certain, tiny fraction of the population who is bright enough and self-motivated enough to pore over all the coursework that is equivalent to a degree, they are certainly very far from the norm. That is to say, Joe Blow will never know as much as an MIT grad. Only the most elite of the motivated might ever hope to, and I assert they would still get more out of actually attending a good university. Working alongside the best, brightest, and most hardworking is absolutely invaluable.

If the degrees of MIT ever lose value, it will not be from OCW.

Re:Oh please lol,

[HanzoSan]

That is BS.

While there is a certain, tiny fraction of the population who is bright enough and self-motivated enough to pore over all the coursework that is equivalent to a degree, they are certainly very far from the norm. That is to say, Joe Blow will never know as much as an MIT grad.

I consider myself Joe Blow, there is nothing preventing me from gathering just as much if not more knowledge than an MIT grad. It's all about invested time, if I invest more time and I focus more, I gain more knowledge and faster. Its that simple. Most MIT grads just happened to go to good high schools, very few are self taught/self motivated. When the majority of MIT students come from ghettos and trailor parks thats when I'll believe that they are a genius and self motivated. I can respect that because it proves without a doubt that they know more than me because they worked harder, not because it was "given" or "spoonfed" to them.

Only the most elite of the motivated might ever hope to, and I assert they would still get more out of actually attending a good university. Working alongside the best, brightest, and most hardworking is absolutely invaluable.


What you refuse to understand is, alot of very elite motivated intelligent people do not get into MIT, this can be for very trivial reasons, such as not having the skills in math, or not being well rounded enough. This has absolutely nothing to do with their intelligence, their ability to work hard, or their willingness to learn.

You assume that everyone at MIT is there because they work the hardest, or because they are the smartest and I'm making the case that its not true, there are people who are smarter and who work harder, who focus more and who accomplish more however perhaps that person did bad on their SAT, or didnt take the SAT at all, perhaps that person did not learn in a very balanced way and so they know everything there is to know about a specific set of subjects but absolutely nothing about another.

MIT selects the most well rounded balanced student, not the most intelligent or hardest working. Someone can be a complete nerd and do nothing else in their life but study one thing, like say computers and not make it into MIT because this person didnt student doesnt know English or Math, does this mean that this student cannot be successful? No, it simply means that the current filtering method favors the well rounded generic genius over the very focused specialized genius.

The industry is the exact opposite as it favors the very focused specialized highly skilled genius over the well rounded genius. That is the point I try to make when I say certification often is more important than a degree from MIT.

Re:Oh please lol,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes a degree helps but certification and a degree are equal to most code monkey sweatshops and in some cases they prefer to hire the person with certifications because that person is self taught

Fixed that for ya ...

Re:Oh please lol,

[sisukapalli1]

There are many folks that do not even have basic language skills or basic math/science skills. All the relevant information is already out there on the net. Just like, all the roads are there, but there are not many runners.

"Certifications" can never substitute for a good education -- at least at a large scale. A really motivated good student will end up in a good program somewhere.

S

OSLO's OLS

[meta4]

The first of these online community projects is about to take off in the form of the OSLO Group's Open Learning Support, which is a formal collaboration with MIT to build community infrastructure that wraps around the OCW materials.

Re:They have more than one Software Engineering co

[Aix]

I agree that this was an extremely valuable class. Case studies in how and how not to design software systems. I think the reason it is not on OCW is almost certainly because they reprint a very large number of copyrighted papers - with permission of course. I seriously doubt that they have redistribution rights for most of them. The papers that we read in the course and the discussions we had in recitation (full professors ran recitation, which was wonderful) was where ALL of the value was. We even had to use our MIT SSL Student Certificates to access most of the papers on the website.

It'll take a seti@home setup to figure out

[Chatmag]

From the write up, one of the courses offered is "Congress and the American Political System"
It will take the combined computing power of every single system just to figure that all out.

The Gold Rush

[kupci]

That's just the hacks who jumped on the IT bandwagon in the roaring 90s - seeing all the easy money to be made in the IT business..

Now all the money is in lawsuits ;)

Re:Cost of MIT -- Second Bachelors ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it still the case that MIT doesn't allow

a second bachelors? I spent two years as there

then moved back home for a while and got a bachelors from another school. When I considered going back to MIT, adminissions told me I'd have to apply as a graduate student. They do not readmit people who already have a degree.

video material

[dharmawan]

i thought the physics video lectures were excellent. is there other video material around of good lectures, particularily in physics, chemistry or biology?

Open Courseware restricts what was available.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember thinking a few years ago that I should have downloaded and archived all these *GREAT* course notes and lecture materials that the hip profs from Stanford, MIT, UW and other schools had put on line, but I didn't.

And then, just as the idea of "courseware" started getting bandied about, many of those sites started to go offline or require local authentication. Why? Because MIT hyped up "open courseware" as if they had invented it, even though all kinds of course information (and more) had been available on school websites for years. And as always: Once marketing gets a few tentacles around cool geek technology, the squeeze is on... Don't get me wrong, MIT is hip and wonderful, but they forced the golden goose to be an egg donor - and it was painful to watch what happened over the next 18 months.

Some of this stuff had been collections dating back to the mid to early 90's, and built by the kind of guys you WANT to listen to, guys who can compress the kind of experiences and insights you'll only get in 9 or 10 years of doing real work into a handful of lectures.

And it was the whole thing, too, usually the prof's own notes, and materials, and old tests and EVERYTHING just dumped into websites (or ftp directories) to be sorted later. Not to mention collections of usenet posts, and source code, and outlines of old papers... A treasure trove that you could wade into, and find magic even if you didn't know what you were looking for.

But then the schools started these initiatives-
almost all of which were started shortly after MIT did the courseware announcement, and one by one all the campuses took an interest in what their teachers were posting. And then blammo! In a year or so, it became much harder to find these treasure troves, because MIT made the administrations takes note of the value of this information.

Google later helped us to find things - sort of - and now you can find specific topics, but you can no longer find the huge amount of course notes you once could discover by simply popping over to the schools .edu web servers.

feh!

Disappointing, but not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

That slashdot would mod down one of the most relevant posts in recent memory, in favor of sucking up to their corepirate sponsors. Definitely a remarkable statement on the state of /.'s greed/fear buyassed 'mentality'.

No matter, real IT continues to progress, at the speed of right.

ALL good gnus is appreciated by those of us who aren't mortgaged up to our .asps in corepirate stock market fraud/pyramid schemes.

Everything will come out in the wwwash.

Agreed

[xenocide2]

The only thing seperating the CS department in my univerity from MIT's is a centralized location and promotion. My AI teacher hosts a central sever for several courses he's taught now and in the past, including online lecture recordings (Tegrity requires MS Java, however =( ). While the name William Hsu (and his degree from China) might throw you off, he speaks English very well, and is very knowledgable about a wide variety of information. In fact, the course pages are designed for "distance" learning. Students attending KSU in Salina (as opposed to Manhattan) can enroll and recieve nearly the same experience as a student attending the live lecture like myself. Well, you might miss his adventures trying to get the recording cart working ;)

Check out the Connexions Project

[emin]

A similar project with a more open source flavor is the Connexions Project. The feature I admire most about Connexions is the idea of creating open content which people can combine in different ways to make a textbook tailored to their course or their own interests. The following is the description of the Connexions project on the main web page:

The Connexions Project is a collaborative, community-driven approach to authoring, teaching, and learning that seeks to provide a cohesive body of high-quality educational content to anyone in the world, for free. The project involves two basic, interrelated components: (1) a Content Commons of collaboratively developed, freely-available material that can be modified for any purpose, and (2) open-source software tools to help students, instructors and authors manage the information assets in the Content Commons. Connexions provides an open, standards-based approach for sharing and advancing knowledge to benefit the global educational community.

Gizmoball!

[Minna Kirai]

So that's what it is! I give job interviews, and ask "What is the largest or most impressive computer program you've ever written?"

Frequently if the applicant is an MIT student, they respond with "a pinball game". Now I can see what assignment those kids were fulfilling with that game.

Note that I don't consider it very impressive if a student has never made any program larger than a single semester's final project. A good programmer should have some love of the art, and will have 1-2 good hobbyist projects under his belt. In the case of Gizmoball, it's even less of an achievement, since the students get a good quantity of example code provided. Isn't it reasonable to expect that MIT students can roll their own elastic-collision physics?

Re:MODULATE PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Your spelling is atrocious. Is that intentional?

Java??? What happened to CLU?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I took this class, we used CLU. How dare they use a language that might actually prove to be useful to know after graduation!

No need to attend classes!

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

I can tell you that when I went to MIT, I found lectures in many courses superfluous. Entertaining, but I was easily able to coast through some classes just by dropping in at the end of a lecture to drop off last week's homework and pick up the current week's. I was able to get the meat of the course entirely from the printed material.

Mind you, there were also many courses for which this wasn't true. For instance, Theory of Algebra and one on computational automata (eg. Turing machines) had only the lecture as source material, with very sketchy course notes, so for those it was imperative to show up.

MIT's lectures are always good, but there are those of us who, given adequate printed material, can function and excel without them.

Not yet.

[Sdoh]

Most of the cources online contain only
the list of the literaure and the homeworks
without solutions. It will not help much.

Many of the MIT professors have their own
very nice sets of lectures which are usually
provided to the listeners for free. They are
not represented online. I guess the main reason
is that publishers require to remove all the
copies from the web to increase sales.

I think someone has to start GPL movement in
education. :)

Re:Java??? What happened to CLU?

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

Hehe, yeah, I remember taking 6.170 with CLU, and read through the reference manual the weekend before classes started. After that, I just blew off the lectures and did all the homework, since the lectures spent way too much time teaching the language, a waste for those of us who already had a few of languages under our belt. And since 6.001 taught LISP and Algol, most 6.3's should have had equal facility with the language. I used to think 6.001 was a bozo filter to weed out people not cut out for programming, but I guess the difficulty so many had with 6.170 is a strong counter-argument to that.

What makes MIT special?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have these sites in other places such as these, what makes MIT different?

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-ee.html
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-cs.html
http://eeclass.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/course_list.cg i
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/academics/courses.html

-cmh

Re:What makes MIT special?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to do your online learning with a school that isn't full of communists.

Not perfect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who asked your opinion, you MIT-hating moron? I hope your mother knows how you feel about MIT. For shame!

Re:enjoying yourselves ?

[lambkabobwithfeta]

[Offtopic. Don't read this.]

Name one country in your list where people outside of these countries are clamoring to get in. None? Why do you suppose that is?

You neglected intent. Many were mistakes, but not all. You also neglected UN involvement with some of these (a common mistake these days).

Enjoying ourselves? Some are, some aren't. How about you?

Blame slashdot readers for US government policy?
That's like blaming your neighbor for bumping you when the bus turns a corner. He isn't driving.

[Posted anonymously to avoid encounters with angry persons intent on vengance against the innocent]

I agree

[gonzo_bozo]

Definitely the way to go but it could be improved a bit. How about doing this in a wiki format like Wikipedia? Any student or even any reader on the net could submit improvements and corrections. The professor in charge of the course could review changes and accept/reject those. I have rarely found notes or textbooks that were totally clear, up-to-date and error-free. We need to close the loop so that we converge toward excellence. Top researchers are not always excellent teachers. I think that even sloppy and boring teachers could end up with top-notch documentation thanks to the frustration a few good students. I think there is no reason why such a system cannot create on-line content with a quality approaching the best textbooks. Well, maybe even better. Textbooks are usually reviewed only by a handful of people and are rather slow to evolve. This allows also contributions from alumni with a few years of real-world experience who can give some extremely good feedback to professors who are unfortunately all too often a few years behind the industry.

Wiki is hypertext. Personally, I am increasingly addicted to hypertext to keep my train of thought rolling. In that respect, paper sucks a lot. In a few years, I hope electronic paper with the same readability as cellulose-based paper will be ubiquitous.

Also, recorded lectures that you can replay at will are also very useful for those of us who have a tendency to dyslexia and who rely heavily on speech to learn.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't read the "very readable article". bored to click links.

Re:Java??? What happened to CLU?

[Harvey]

If it makes you feel any better, Scheme is still as firmly entrenched as ever.

I love this

[Derkec]

For my Senior CS project, we built a system that would contain class information for the people in that class. It would also tie all your classes together into a single portal. One of our "wouldn't it be great if" goals would be to take take the class information on our site (similar to MIT's content in theory) package it, and ship it to other universities. What would be nifty about that, is there are many schools who simply don't have staff capable of putting together a class of the calibur MIT does in subjects such as Engineering. By using a prepackaged course and modifying it to their own needs, smaller (or poorer) universities could raise the quality of education they provide. I'm not saying they'll become MIT, but they could improve on their current situation.

I'm really excited to see if other big name schools will follow MIT's lead and provide simila r materials. Even if they aren't quite as kind and do charge for them, I'd still be excited.

The correct link

[Derkec]

Sorry, botched that link and didn't preview.

academia takes back the torch

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really great. The web itself is the best learning tool the world has known. I wish that poorer countries had more pcs (and elecricity) because then education wouldn't be such a hard slog to provide. More should be done in this area but we can't have everything at once!

MIT have joined in with this spirit and I applaud it. This is the answer to America's critics (I am often one) - giving things to others because you can.

Well done MIT!

Re:Computer Science: What's left?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that Computer Science may be able to discover a better way to have sex with a mare.

Why don't you go fuck your 3 deaf children in the ear.

Re:Cost of MIT -- Second Bachelors ??

[inburito]

More than likely so. If you already got a bachelors degree you will not get into their undergraduate program.

As an amusing sidenote, they did pretty much do away with triple majoring few years back. You can only double nowadays. Still, the nice thing with doing that is that you actually get separate diplomas and not just a mention of both majors on one.

Re:Java??? What happened to CLU?

[GnuVince]

Hehehe, Java useful :) That is funny, because by the time someone who enters MIT this year graduate, Java might not still be around. Talk about useful about graduation

David Diamond...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't he play Screech on Saved by the Bell? :P

Re:MODULATE PARENT DOWN

[johanges]

Your spelling is atrocious. Is that intentional?

If he had spelled "moderate" A-T-R-O-C-I-O-U-S I think even he might have noticed (but I could be wrong, his head-gap appear to be unusually large).

--
Parts of this posting is claimed by SCO, but they won't tell me what parts.

*Intended* value

[fm6]

Well, yeah, instructors have been putting class content on the web for a long time. Less hassle than waiting your turn at the photocopier. When I need to look up some half-forgotten big of computer science, I go to Google, and almost always end up with some material from some state U somewhere, sort of an online handout. Very useful, even if it wasn't meant for me.

But that's not what's exciting about the MIT initiative. They're not the first university to put class content online -- but they're the first to do so in a standard format on a single server, with the announced goal of making all class materials available to the public at large. Of course this material is still incomplete -- the initiative's only been underway for a couple of years.

And of course it will never allow the same level of access that tuition-paying students get. Doesn't mean it isn't very cool.

Re:*Intended* value

[TrekkieGod]

they're the first to do so in a standard format on a single server, with the announced goal of making all class materials available to the public at large.

That's part of the "hype" I was referring to. What does "all" class materials mean? You do know faculty are not requrired and will never be required to post anything to OpenCourseWare, right? It's in the faq. That by itself guarantees you'll never have a standard content availability in all the classes. And having everything in the same format "on a single server" really isn't useful to me. Sure, it's easier to get to class webpages, but I still don't have cool content in those pages.

And of course it will never allow the same level of access that tuition-paying students get.

I don't want the same level of access tuition-paying students get. In fact, I'm not very difficult to please...I want to be able to get to two things, and an optional third thing. I want lecture materials for the entire class that stand by themselves (ie, no referring to a textbook which I think is a bad practice anyway...students in a class can read the textbook, they don't need a repeat of it in the lectures), and I want problem sets with answers. Optionally, video lectures might be cool, but I can definitely live without it.

Re:*Intended* value

[fm6]

I'm as hype-sensitive as the next guy. You can't work in the computer industry as long as I have without hearing and seeing a lot of it. But there isn't that much hype here. You're dismissing the whole thing as hype simply because it doesn't meet your specific requirements.

I find it depressing how many techies, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, evaluate every product, project, or whatever, purely on how it works for them personally -- as if somebody were spending on that development money and effort solely to please them. Childish.

Re:*Intended* value

[TrekkieGod]

I *really* shouldn't reply, but calling people childish because you don't understand their arguments is something you should refrain from doing. I'm not dismissing it because it doesn't meet "my requirements". It's hype because universities have been putting that type of information online long before OpenCourseWare, even you admit that. It's not unique. Ok, so they put it all in one server, and gave all pages the same format and look...that's not a new idea in any form...it takes a sysadmin for the server(s), new accounts for professors, and a template web page they can edit. Do you really think that if some small no-name university had announced before MIT they would put their normal course webpages "available for the public" in a central site they wouldn't get the shrug?

Re:*Intended* value

[fm6]

It's hype because universities have been putting that type of information online long before OpenCourseWare...

And I already told you why I thought there was more to the MIT thing than that. If you don't buy my arguments, fine. But simply ignoring them and insisting on the last word is childish. Sorry.