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."

Comments

Hopefully this will start a trend

[Muerto]

I hope that information will someday be " free as in beer " for everyone. Now if you are born poor you will most likely stay poor... and this is changing. The internet has been a great gift to everyone... it brings people of all income levels to an even playing field.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[kurosawdust]

Now if you are born poor you will most likely stay poor

Whoa. I am a liberal in most cases, but this is just crap. If you have access to the internet and >= 3 or 4 free hours a day and don't have a learning disability, you have (within epsilon of) no excuses. In the case of something like computer science, there is (not even within epsilon of) zero excuse for your aptitude other than your desire and the amount of work you put in. It sounds just as romantic as the quote I am responding to, but it's true; if you plug someone in to the internet, they can learn about almost anything they want and in all probability be great at it - they just have to work.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[tessaiga]

Education will never be "free as in beer", only "free as in speech". Putting together a good curriculum, course notes, problem sets, and finals is a lot of work. Currently OpenCourseWare is subsidized by the school and existing MIT students, some of whom have not been terribly happy about the idea.

A better way to put it would be that the marginal cost of making information available once it's produced is free, and that the best we can hope for is that schools will make pre-existing information available for free. Whether this works as a business model will depend on whether the "value added" by the educational environment of actually attending an institution makes up for the cost of tuition.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[phoenix_rizzen]

The problem with public libraries is that nobody uses them anymore. This means they are losing funding ... which leads to fewer new books ... which makes it even less relevant and fewer people will use them. The hours are being cut, making it harder for people to use them.

It'd be nice to see a library that didn't open until after noon, and stayed open into the wee hours. Then it would actually be useful for students, those who work, and so on. Being open from 9 until 5 isn't really convenient for anybody.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[spektr]

If you have access to the internet and >= 3 or 4 free hours a day

May be a problem for someone who is poor and has to have two jobs at a time.

if you plug someone in to the internet, they can learn about almost anything they want and in all probability be great at it - they just have to work.

May be true for computer sciences. It seems to work for India. But I'm not sure if this is true for most other professions, too.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[Fred IV]

I've always wondered why teachers don't "open source" some text books.

That would be nice, but that would interfere with the goal of most colleges: sucking every dollar they can out of you. The teachers might not mind the idea, but the campus bookstore that anally rapes students coming and going (even on used books) and the administration would probably have a fit if their teachers started making decisions that cut into their profit margin.

There are exceptions where schools appear to be doing something altruistic, but MIT is making more than their share on tuition and the usual. I'm sure they still turn away more than they admit, even if they are giving their course materials away.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[stanmann]

Well if learning is your goal, your local public college is the place. the library is typically open past 1am, and unless you want to take books with you, is free to non-students.

Re:Hopefully this will start a trend

[Minna Kirai]

angry students who were finding that their $150 Accounting 101 book became worthless after the sememster was over.

"Worthless"? Surely you meant "not resalable to next year's students".

A book's worth should be measured by its information content. If the knowledge a class presents is worth your spending $3000 in tuition, surely the keeping the textbook is worth more than the $50 you'd get selling it used.

If not, then I'd question why you bothered taking the course at all.

IMO

[novakane007]

This has to be one of the coolest ideas I've seen in a long time! Education without borders. Kudos to MIT!

Not particularly useful without a teacher

[Brahmastra]

A lot of the course notes aren't particularly useful without a teacher actually explaining things to you. For example, look at the following link .
While some of the notes may be useful and educational, I don't think it replaces a real, live professor explaning things and available to answer questions.

Re:Faculty members are very helpful too

[Anonymous Coward]

well, you just fucked yourself buddy! /. the professors!

one problem

[vraddict]

The fact that the information is available, and even the fact that you can gain access to the instructors for clarification still does not put everyone on an even playing field. The one thing that most people seem to care about are degrees and resumes. The poorest yet most intelligent person in the world could study these courses, and gain an equivalent education to those with degrees, and could even possibly surpass their abilities. It won't do them any good in the present state to learn structural engineering, but not have a degree.

Books

[cybermace5]

Many of the courses I looked at had a decent amount of information, but you really couldn't understand what was going on without the book. Engineering texts still cost $60 to $200 these days.

I will probably go through some of these as handy little refresher courses, since I already have books and can get by. But if you go through some of these courses and learned only what is in the notes and handouts, don't consider yourself an MIT graduate yet.

Re:Most schools have these

[Anonymous Coward]

> What was lacking was a common index to campus-wide pages, and a standard format for all of them.

True enough. But the thing that's the most sorely lacking is online access to textbooks.

There are many great out-of-print textbooks that will never be seen by human eyes again, because their publishers steadfastly refuse to allow them to be republished in any medium. That is a moral outrage, and it shows a deep flaw in the concept of copyright.

As a result, a new generation of textbooks must be developed specifically for free online usage. MIT's course notes are a start in that direction.

The copyright monopoly system has robbed us of a staggering amount of information. Slowly, in the coming years, we will rebuild, and we will recover from the terrible loss we have suffered.

I've Been Using It For Awhile...

[the_mad_poster]

...and it's great! I'm stuck in a shitty little comm. coll. here where everything is "learn how to use vendor x's program y" and it stinks. I told several profs to their faces now that I'm not coming to any classes when we're not taking a test because there's nothing that I can learn there that I care about or that matters.

With the Open CourseWare site though, I've started plugging my way through an almost complete cirriculum! I finally got the motivation to learn Java so I could use it in the 6-170 course. The content, organization, and overall structure of the course is incredible (6-170 is by far one of the best classes I've ever had in any subject at any school with any professor ever)! I'm looking forward to following it into the next class I work through on OCW.

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.

Re:I've Been Using It For Awhile...

[the_mad_poster]

Yea, MIT and Berkely :)

A lot of schools these days take money from venduhs (Microsoft is the big one here) and, in return, teach their products rather than theory and solid practice with multiple products. The worst part is, they try to make it look like theory to look good. For example, I got duped bad on the "Intermediate Database Management" course - they market it as a class about RDBMS management, but it's "Access For Dummies" through and through and the teacher knows about as much as RDBMSs as I do about brain surgery. I'm a follower of the writings of Fabian Pascal, C.J. Date (I had actually just wrapped up a rather intensive study of "Database Design" before this miserable class started), and, of course, Codd, so you can imagine how painful that class is.... that's pretty much been the standard tech class at this technological dung heap (the gen ed courses are ok though, so it makes a good jump start to a 4 year to save you money - just avoid program-specific courses like the plague if you care to actually learn anything).

Unfortunately, from what I've seen, that's the way it works at a lot of schools these days - they teach a product instead of a theory. There are exceptions, of course, but after looking around, I've resigned myself to the fact that unless I come across baskets of cash (and pull my grades up...) I'm not going to get an overall quality tech education anywhere. I can get "bad" for cheap where I am now (temporarily, albeit) or "average" for "somewhat expensive" where I'm planning to go shortly, but anything approaching "good" costs bundles.

Re:Hopefully this will start a (x1488)

[The_K4]

Time-out, it's now always about "need-based scholarships". It's also about admissions....I know a person, who was about 7/8ths of the way though college Working full time school nights and weekends. She got married, and moved to where her new husband Lives/Works, it's in the same state but far enough away from where she used to live that she can't continue at her old school. Now she has good grades (better them a 3.5 GPA) but NONE of the schools where she now lives are even considering transfer students!

Another problem is that too many "need-based scholarships" expect parents to pay for a student's college. I know 2 people (in different situations) how got nailed by this. One's parents both worked to put themselves through college and expected their kids to do the same. The other was raised in a very poor single parent family. When it was time to go to college this guy finds out that not only does the "need-biased scholarships" count the child-support that his mother NEVER received against his "income" but it also counted his semi-rich father's net worth against him. He qualified for NO financial aid, even thought his mother made $35K a year. Just more "need-biased scholarships" won't fix all our problems with education today!

Will this make other schools more competitive?

[clusterix]

I have been through community college and umich and now live in Singapore. I can say that around the world a 4 year degree is not equal. I hope that this will encourage students to beg for better course designs and more advanced knowledge than what 90% of the world currently gets.

I also hope that engineering faculty will seriously discuss and compare their current curriculums and bring them up to par as much as possible (with in their and their students capability).

Re:Most schools have these

[madenosine]

Well, not really....most course pages cannot be read at all on their own. Many only contain the sylabus and announcements (while there are, or course, some exceptions). OCW puts (at least) the basic concepts online and makes them availible to all. Most professors have written up new problem sets and tests specially for OCW. Also, some courses also have videos online (ex: 18.06 and 8.02). (A lot of courses are only able to provide videos to students because allowing public access would be a violation of copyright laws for materials they use during the lectures.)

Regardless, it is a major step up from simply indexing the pages (these are not the course webpages anyways.) Fairly soon, 1,800 classes (out of 2,000) will be availible. (the other 200 are discussion classes) ...although my view of "soon" may be permanently skewed by blizzard...

Re:Poor places (Re:Hopefully this will start a tre

[Forge]

I expected this response. Which is why I made sure to mention where I am. (Jamaica). My information is sourced from actual ambitious immigrants. (You know the kind of people that built your country)

There are over 1 Million Jamaicans living in the USA (2.7 Million in JA). This means that Every Jamaican here (Including me) has family and friends in the states. Those links don't evaporate when the plane takes off. Many of those Jamaicans leave here with very little education and are lucky to make minimum wage. They still manage to save the kinds of money I mentioned.

The lifestyle of this uneducated immigrant starts out at less than most Slashdoters can tolerate. Being able to cook each day instead of eating out, having a taste for "5th quarter" (Ox Tail, Turkey Neck) helps to reduce cost. Important things like education are spending priority. They buy second hand repossessed cars as the financial situation improves.

They live in places like Brucklin and then buy houses in Long Island that are nearly condemned and spend a year fixing it up without professional help then sell it for 2X to 3X the purchase price. a rented Manhattan Apartment is only used if it comes with the job.

Of course there are those that just become American bums and start collecting welfare as soon as they qualify or get into crime. Lucky for you they are a minority. The IRS says Jamaican Americans are on average wealthier (I.e. Paying more taxes) than Most other ethnic groups.