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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.'"
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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
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.
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!