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MIT Open Courseware with 500 Courses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hit-the-books dept.

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."

5 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hopefully this will start a trend by Muerto · · Score: 4, Informative

    ahhh.. yes i was waiting for that point to be made... you forget the public library!

  2. Lecture videos for one course by bartc · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Poor places (Re:Hopefully this will start a trend) by Forge · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 ?
  4. Re:Hopefully this will start a trend by dmauer · · Score: 4, Informative
    When I was in school, it seemed that they changed the text every semester so that kids couldn't buy used books, or resell them after use. It almost seemed as if they were colluding with the publishers.
    This is an awfully well-known scheme the publishing houses use to sell books. The schools can't do anything about it, anyway. Here's how it works:

    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.
  5. Re:Litmus test... by losvedir · · Score: 3, Informative

    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