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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.'"
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
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.
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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!!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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.
Jilles
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.
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.
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.
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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
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).
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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!
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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.
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.
.edu web servers.
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
feh!
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.