Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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 ?
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!
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).
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 ?
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.
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