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MIT Open Courseware with 500 Courses
Comp Bio Guy writes "As promised, MIT has finally released 500 courses worth of lecture notes, syllabi, and exams to provide a 'free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world.' Take a look (and maybe a test or two) at MIT's OCW site."
ahhh.. yes i was waiting for that point to be made... you forget the public library!
They video taped an entire semester and it is available via realplayer!
I have been 'auditing' it in my spare time for a couple weeks now.
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
The news is that they reached the 500-course mark, not that they opened up the library. That news was released yesterday.
This is actually a very neat proposition, but it requires a lot of DIY go-getter attitude. Though some may get responses from MIT professors, you have no access to MIT facilities (try some of the Physics/Chem/Engineering labs at home) and no guarantee of access to profs or TA's to answer your questions.
And also remember that none of the information in these courses is stuff that the world never knew before. It gathers it together and provides a framework for self-study. The lecture notes and the professors' insights in them add value. But these do not make this a quantum leap above just burying your nose in books at the library.
I had a Lit prof in college. In communist China, it was decided he was not university material and he was sent to work on a farm. While there he taught himself English and Russian, read voraciously, and wrote critical papers of such quality that his self-directed, spare-time work was sufficient to be considered equivalent to full undergrad studies. He was eventually admitted to a graduate program in Literature, skipping an undergraduate university program.
This is the kind of person - with the intelligence, attitude, and drive to take advantage of this - for whom MIT's open courseware would be a Godsend. But people like him would still do a lot of it with or without the MIT materials available.
For most of the public, i.e. the ones who weren't self-teaching themselves before, it is and will remain merely a curiosity.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
For anyone interested in the MIT course 6.004 Computation Structures: the lectures are very similar to ArsDigita University's "How Computers Work".
ArsDigita University put all its lectures online in realvideo format. Here's mirror of the "How Computers Work" course.
IF I lived in the US and made minimum wage I could live in a slum (Like the bad parts of New York) so rent would be cheap enough to leave me with enough money to buy a PC. $700 pays for a decent system and is ONLY 3 weeks pay at minimum wage. Or 3 months with aggressive saving.
What you should ask about is People who live in Poor countries (Like Jamaica) where Minimum wage is $33.5 per week and any PC costs at least 17% more (or $819) for my example system. I.e. 6 Months pay at minimum wage or 2 years of aggressive saving.
The price gap for Internet Bandwidth is even wider. I.e. Your ENTIRE salary at minimum wage would barely pay for entry level ADSL (256K up 128K down)
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
1) Publish a new edition of your textbook at least every couple of years. Be sure to change the page numbering significantly, and ideally, move stuff from chapter to chapter. The harder it is to syncronize with the old edition, the better!
2) Release it as soon as you're almost sold out of the previous edition.
3) Laugh as bookstores can no longer carry new copies of the old edition, so professors have to require the new edition -- they can't assume that everyone will be able to find a used copy of the old edition, and it'll take way too much of their time to synchronize teaching from both editions.
4) Rinse, Repeat
5) PROFIT!
Arseholes.
=== "Some people see the glass as half-empty. Others see it as half-full. I see the glass as too big." -G. Carlin.
I went to Harvard undergrad, and while I agree with the statement, it's not the whole story. Sure, you can graduate from Harvard while taking the bare minimum of required courses (and there are a lot of 'gut' courses). But schools like Harvard mirror the real world I think, in that it is what you make of it. You can take top-notch extremely difficult courses taught by nobel laureates too if you want, as long as you are motivated and willing to sweat it out. Harvard does very little spoon feeding and hand holding.
I went to MIT for grad school, and my impression of the undergrad courses as a TF and just a member of the community was that MIT courses were a lot more rigorous and you didnt have as much leeway. I did feel there was quite a bit of spoon feeding though, so I'm not sure if that approach was better or not.
In any event, it would be simple - a book is created and is available for modification so as long as the modifications are submitted back to the original author. The text would evolve into something that could not be purchased from *any* publisher.
Check out Wikibooks. They are a sister project of Wikipedia and are doing just that without the "noncommercial" limitation of the MIT license. Anyone can contribute directly too.
Well... As I type this from my dorm room at MIT i'm gonna have to say that doesn't seem quite accurate. The classes here are *really* hard. I'm not sure how hard it is at other schools, but I imagine it would be at least a little easier.
;)
* My MIT interviewer said that she would talk on the phone with her boyfriend at UC Berkeley, and that after a couple weeks they could no longer talk about the same class, since the MIT one was moving faster. At the send-off party I verified this with him..
* My Dad went to Cal Tech, thought it was too hard, and then transfered to UC San Diego. He said there was a very notiecable difference in difficulty level in his match courses between the two, so there *are* differences in schools.
Oh.. and about Harvard and Stanford... those really are just easy schools once you're in..
"True dat with a wiffle ball bat." -- kabrakan
There's no way I can afford to go to MIT - as much as I would love to - but with OCW, at least I can benefit from a great deal of their wisdom with some elbow grease, even without the cash.
What makes you think you can't afford MIT? The Ivies and company have very good financial aid policies. It's just possible, under certain circumstances, to pay less than community college. I go to Penn, and basically only pay for room and board and books.
One of MIT's main goals with OCW is to provide course materials for other universities. OCW's primary mission is not to provide a free education to individuals with internet access, though there is nothing in their policy that prevents it. The real winners from OCW will be institutes of higher learning that can now use the OCW material as a basis for creating their own university courses. Obviously universities in poorer countries can benefit greatly from OCW.
About a year ago, when OCW was first being accounced, I attended a presentation by a MIT official who explained OCW and some of the issues behind it. He also explained that there was some resistance by professors, which mainly fell into the following areas:
- Concern over intellectual property and copyright issues.
- Concern that the professors would not have enough time,
to prepare OCW versions of their courses, given their present
research and teaching responsibilities.
- Concern that the material presented via OCW would be of
high quality and worthy of MIT.
Interestingly the resistance due to IP/copyright concerns was the smallest of the problems. In fact most professors (and students) welcomed OCW, and from what I've read in the press, most of the world has too. That said, I was not too surprised to read the previously mentioned article critical of OCW. To complain that your degree will be watered down, because because others will have access to the same material for free, is selfish to say the least. Such remarks are definitly not in the spirit of MIT, at least not while I was there in the early 80's.You will note that OCW, in its early stages, will probably consist of a wide variety of items in strange and incompatible formats, hopefully coalescing over time into a more unified body of information. This is deliberate. MIT has a policy of never specifying too many details. In OCW's case, this means that MIT is not specifying how the material must be technically presented or formatted, knowing that the best ideas will bubble up as MIT's creative minds ship away at the problem. Indeed another goal of OCW is to find better ways to use the internet to enhance the learning experience. In some ways, OCW's journey is also it's destination, with the hope of finding something interesting along the way.
This approach, is what lead to the creation of X (and a ton of other cool stuff) as a spinoff of the Athena project. There the stated goal was (somewhat simplified):
- We have a bunch of different computers, let's connect
them all together in a network, in spite of the different
hardware and operating systems.
Compare that to all the universities that implemented their campus wide networks by merely mandating that everyone must purchase an IBM-PC/Apple/etc.---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Just one [anal] clarification ... all MIT classes are noted by a decimal notation system, so it's "6.170," not "6-170." The 6 is short for Course VI, which is the EECS department. It's just a little thing that any MIT student would immediately notice as being odd about how you wrote it.