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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 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.
...can feel dumb in the privacy of your own home.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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.
This has to be one of the coolest ideas I've seen in a long time! Education without borders. Kudos to MIT!
WURD!!
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.
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
Just what the world needed! Free Nuclear Engineering classes! From the comfort of your own 3rd world country!
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.
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.
...
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
The optimist in me says 'I always wanted to know more about the adiabatic approximation and Berry's phase.' The pessimist says 'methinks this will only lead to an increase in the number of people who think they know what they are talking about.'
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).
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.
of MIT.
I mean, com'on. Do you think your going to get that kind of service now that you told about 100,000 people about it?
You the guy that kept blabbing about the internet, aren't you?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 ?
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 ?
...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.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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!
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).
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.
Hilarious!
Seriously, this MIT project is a great resource.
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!
Fianlly I can take a course in Womyns Studies! From MIT!!!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
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.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
This isn't a troll, don't get me wrong the whole idea is amazing, and they're doing a lot more than anyone else is doing, but so far I've only seen pages which describe courses and things like that. There's never much acutal content. Just a short page describing the course. If you're lucky you get links to PDF's assignments and stuff made with Powerpoint, which is a step up, but you never get all the info.
Guess you still have to pay for that.
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.