Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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...
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.
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.
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?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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-)
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
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.
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
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!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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. :))
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.
while (!sleep){
sheep++;
}
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!