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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."
6.021J Quantitative Physiology: Cells and Tissues Fall 2002
is listed in EECS department. Can someone explain this?
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
I started going through one of the course few months back. And one few ocassions I email the instructors, for clarifications/explanations. And I always got a prompt reply. Even though I am not paying anything to MIT.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Most of them carry assignments, solutions, sample exams, and readings similar to the MIT Open Courseware site....and they're publicly available too.
What was lacking was a common index to campus-wide pages, and a standard format for all of them. When individual professors/TA's put up their class pages, their formats are not standardized, nor are they always upto date (for example, if an assignment was a handout).
From a superficious look at some Electrical Engg and Computer Science classes, I think the MIT folks have basically indexed all the pages, standardized the format, and made sure they are all uptodate.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
you can email the faculty member associated with the course, and you will get a prompt reply. I have always received a reply same day.
offcourse this not same as learning in a classroom. But you cant have that for free. You need to pay for that. Professors need to make a living as well.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
More useful to the internet denizen would be free online textbooks. They can, for many people, replace the teacher. The last bit that remains missing could easily be filled by a mentor - even if they aren't local.
Notice how the Linux and other free software/open source software communities have online How-tos, books, and free mentoring? One of the keys to success for many organizations is educating its users, and providing easy education to potential users.
MIT isn't just doing this out of the goodness of its heart - but hopefully other institutions will follow suit. Hopefully free or very cheap broadband will come about, with a computer in every household. Every person can become whatever they want --> Which may not be a good thing for some people, but it is, after all, their decision.
Freedom to learn.
-Adam
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.
1. I don't think anybody was suggesting that this should replace real profs at MIT. This is extra resources for people outside of universities, who don't have the option of talking to a prof.
2 Personally, I actually disagree with your point. I have found that I learn the most reading and solving problems, not when I listen to somebody talking (especially not in the big lecture format).
Tor
I've always wondered why teachers don't "open source" some text books. 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. I almost organized a book burning with the angry students who were finding that their $150 Accounting 101 book became worthless after the sememster was over. There are few scholarships/grants that will cover the cost of a text.
Don't get me wrong - I kept all the good stuff (and still reference it today when google doesn't come through - there are few such cases but I have whacked a few).
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.
Students Win. Society Wins. Evil Publishers Lose.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I think GNU/Linux and other free software is a great example of how well the internet can work as a learning tool. We have the Linux Documentation Project, man pages and of course the actual source code. You can easily learn very advanced stuff without buying a single book or attending a single lecture. Why couldn't this be true for other areas as well? The information just needs to be there. I understand Stallman very well when he says that documentation should be free too (FDL).
Not with the way public libraries have been getting their budgets cut, which has translated into fewer open hours around these parts. But I'm sure the mickey d's manager will understand when they request lunch hours off so they can improve themselves.
Yup, that and parents who valued learning. If more parents valued learning over entertainment and availed themselves of the Public Library vs paying $50 monthly for Cable, $300ea for a tv in each room and $60ea for a VCr to go with, they could afford to bootstrap themselves from poverty to educated.
And no I'm not particularly motorvated, so I haven't gone as far as I could.
BUT I've reached the goals I set for myself my senior year of HS and surpassed them. I'm a software engineer for the largest Employer in the US, I own a fully paid for new car, Cell phone, pager and home network. I didn't however realize that I was "born poor" till after I moved out, and the first year on my own, made more than my parents combined income.
Frugal living, careful planning and inventive meal management. I never went hungry. And yes, living at the "poverty line".
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
To quote Qeen Victoria:
"Give my people plenty of beer, good beer, and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them"
Can the same be said for information? Which would you think is better for society?
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
From the FAQ:
The CMS we have been using since the beginning of 2003 is a customized commercial option, Microsoft Content Management System 2002. The reasons for the choice of Microsoft 2002 were manifold: Microsoft made a serious commitment to the MIT OCW project, the total cost of ownership of Microsoft CMS 2002 was significantly lower than the other vendors in consideration, and the Microsoft product offered a high-level of usability for the end-users, MIT OCW's faculty liaisons and MIT's faculty. The entire MIT OCW Web site is now published dynamically out of the customized CMS.
What? Microsoft getting positive exposure on Slashdot? I think I just saw a pig fly past my window on his way to a frozen hell.
Social Engineering Expert: Because there is no patch for stupidity.
Sorry for not completing my point before. In the US, it's a rare individual who is too poor to own a PC with net access. More common is that such an item isn't a priority (I.e. Cable TV with some premium channels or ADSL? Same price, choose one).
Personally, I don't make enough as an engineer in the 3rd world to afford MIT so this will be useful for personal development. My degree will have to come from a lesser institution.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Now it's time for some people to get together and create a discussion site for each of the courses so every1 can have a place to go to ask questions about example problems and notes.
I think it would be great to see how students at other so-called "second-rate" or state schools are able to do in these courses. I think it would provide a great comparison of school difficulty.
I found the #1 party school in the nation to have a difficult engineering and math departments. I've also heard a lot of people say that the only tough thing about Stanford, Harvard, or even MIT is getting in. Once you're in, apparently it's no more difficult than other schools.
Granted you're reading the rantings and ravings of a CS dropout.
-non sig- Bow to your non-sig overlords!
I recall having them apologize to us on the 6.001 exam fall 1984 because it was too hard for the graduate assistants to finish in the alloted time.
.should I be upset that I was tortured and new students aren't, or happy for new students that they aren't getting hosed and having their egos crushed?
What I saw as answers were for much easier problems. Hmmm. .
I wonder if this undermines the role of teachers in the educational process? More and more teachers are expected to manufacture course material instead of actually TEACH. Make slides, make course notes, make syllabi, use the projector, use PowerPoint. All this technology inhibits the flow of information for the sake of record keeping.
Is anyone else saddened that this puts another nail in the coffin for charismatic teachers who just stand in front of the room and speak fluidly from knowledge? I go to a big university and am SICK of the powerpoint and or PDF slides. Sick of professors that just read notes from another curriculum or from the book of the course text.
Sharing of information between educators is fine. I don't mind it. But this format encourages classrooms unsuitable for learning only for expensive projectors and overpaid suits that can read a slide.
I think it would apply to grade school even more than college, for the same reason as why governments should only use open-source software: if you're using public money to pay for information products, shouldn't that information also be in the public domain?
School systems shouldn't be slaves to the big publishing companies that base their books' content on marketablility (e.g. making sure not to offend anyone, and raising the P.C.-ness level to the point where the texts are completely devoid of interesting content). A state's school system should be able to put a lot less money into some bargain-basement publisher who *just* does the job of printing the damn things; the savings could then go into a small staff of content writers/editors to accomodate whatever specializations their local culture calls for. And to contibute the the work as a whole.
Yeah, I like this idea a LOT.
Btw, another reason why it would be more applicable to grade school is that college texts tend to be much more specialized. Just as the most successful open src. projects are for those "fundamental" programs like OS, brower, etc., the most successful open-src texts would be the ones covering the fundamentals of math, science, etc.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
It's a racket, dude.
Text book writers update a small % of the actual content, but change all of the questions (slightly). Otherwise books would last for 10 years and they couldn't make money every year.
Intro EE hasn't changed much in the last 15 years. (What has could be handed out as a packet.) But new books were issued every 3.
Complete BS.
A speech...
This would be really smart thing for particularly high schools and grade schools who every few years have to buy textbooks. With the school budgets so tight, it would seem obvious, hey let's write our own books. Or even all the schools in a state decide to write an open source Algebra One book.
I think the real reason that schools don't do this is that unfortunately too many school teachers aren't aware that the technology exists to do this cost effectively. So ironically the reason that the people who teach and inform people don't do this is ignorance.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
However, programming is distinctly different from computer science. In programming, you want to know exactly how to code--how to create classes, what pointers go where, etc. In computer science, you are trying to understand the way the computer operates and manipulates data ("thinks", as it were), so that you know how to code effectively. Scheme is frequently used as a language in introductory computer science classes because it is a very good language for teaching these concepts. That's why it's used in 6.001.
Also, Scheme is a LISP variant, and the mechanics of LISP and its close cousins make them the languages of choice in the field of artificial intelligence. You probably wouldn't want to, say, write a webserver in Scheme (although a friend of mine once did...), but it is, in fact, a good choice for 6.034 or actual work in the AI field. (A different friend of mine, a CS graduate student working on an AI project, absolutely swears by CommonLISP as the best computer language known to man.)