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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."
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
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).
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
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 ?
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
Trust me,
when you're taking some mid-level 'weed-out the weak' physics/math/engineering course and EVERYONE you are competing against was in the top 2% of their graduating class with unbelievable SAT scores, it makes a difference.
Bell-curve grading in such a scenario can be a real bitch, and profs for whatever reason ( lazyness is my guess ) often use it anyway.
In my experience, the teachers at less-difficult-to-enter schools have to work a little harder to explain the course material to students, and thus the classes are much more understandable and the learning experience better... and of course, easier. But not necessarily due to grading- it's easier due to the fact that you don't have to either already know the material or teach it to yourself ( or hire a tutor ), which happens at places like MIT and Stanford because the 'teacher' is some math research grad student who is a wiz but is teaching because he has to, not because it's his job, and can't understand how you wouldn't 'get' such basic material. I know this might be taken the wrong way, but at a big-name research university, you can count yourself lucky if your math secton leader can speak understandable english- and they won't know jack about teaching.
If you really want to learn about Diff Eq's, you might be better off taking the course from Foothill College rather than Leland Stanford, Jr University. Sad but true.
Of course, you'd rather do your research project at one of the big-name schools, and it always looks better on a resume...
I finished my BS CS degree, for what it's worth.