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Carnegie Mellon Starts Offering Courses Online
OckNock writes "Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, Carnegie Mellon currently only has five courses available. However, Carnegie Mellon is unique in that they offer '...courses [that] include a number of innovative online instructional components such as: cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, simulations,' so rather than just offering course material Carnegie Mellon is pursuing a more interactive, community approach. Carnegie Mellon is also unique in that they offer the courses as an Academic Version which '...is offered through educational institutions for credit awarded by the student's home institution.' Interestingly, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds both MIT's OpenCourseWare and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative ('Funding for the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has been provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.') Sadly, the courses are not supported on any open source platforms or even any open source web browsers. More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online."
"More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online."
It's simple, they won't.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
hmm...so does your university have to pick this up before you can get credit for it? I supposed it would be too much to hope for to be able to take classes for credit, for free..
Twenties Retirement
So would this be better than Phoenix Online? I honestly wonder if employers consider the online school a joke. Ive always wanted to take some online course but the cost has always been the same as going to the school. They should realize that the majority who would take IT related courses would work with other browers than IE, and for that matter I didnt see if it works on any MAC browers, would be fun though. I think I have learned more on slashdot than any school could teach (grin) +5 for using OldSkool IRC Grin!
Apply Now for Summer Faculty Workshops 2004
Our free Summer workshops are scheduled for June 28-30 and July 7-9. Application deadline is April 29. Fellowships and travel stipend are available. The workshops are intended both to support instructors in using the online courses and to have participants inform the ongoing development of the courses.
Anyone have a time machine handy? Anyone?
On a serious note, this is definitely an interesting thing. I wouldn't mind getting some extra Chemistry credits (student, U of Wisc @ Madison)
They're currently fine tuning the online beer bong simulator so they can offer as complete an experience online as off.
More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online
Virginia Tech CS department has most of the course material availabe for download online. Some courses even have audio streams with them. Best site for CS students everywhere.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
Most of the class have at best course outlines and HW problems. Very few have lecture notes, very few have solutions to problems. Its like, whats the point?
It appears to me that they are simply beta testing these courses on an unsuspecting public. "Available Now: Pilot version of CSR course including Current content, Case studies and Causality Lab 1.0 Available Summer 2004: Pilot version of CSR updated with improved navigation, interactive pseudo tutors and Causality Lab 2.0 which includes a causal model exercise builder." Available Fall 2004: Actual version of CSR updated with payment module accepting PayPal and Credit Cards.
yeah, but you can get an @alumni.cmu.edu forwarding address free.
if you get half as much spam through the old andrew account as i do, its a welcome change.
Ya know, learning for learning is fine as far as it goes. But if it doesn't come with credit for a degree, the bookstore is just as good.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I hope this is done more often, not with lecture notes or online material - it's useless. Live lectures however are not. Universities sell degrees, not educations. It would be easy to provide such resources to the general public; it could be a recruiting tool, advertising, etc. Since you're not going to get a degree no matter how many courses you watch online, it doesn't cheapen what the university offers for a *ahem* small fee.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Quite a number of really excellent courses are already freely available, even if they don't have as much publicity as MIT's OCW.
n dex.html
s p
For example: (there are many more)
Berkeley (Webcasts)
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/i
University of Washington:
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/title.a
Looking through it, I'm failing to see where open source browsers can not view the contents. Was the submitter referring to the Shockwave player? Cause, uh... It's working fine in Firefox.
Are any of these courses degree status?
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
Not sure if somebody already mentioned this, but UC Berkeley has lecture notes, exams, and other academic content for almost all of its classes online. (Just Google to find out).
As an example, here are links to the class webpages for many of Berkeley's CS classes.
I think Berkeley also has live video lectures for a few of its classes online.
The courses offered through OLI require, in most cases, Java and Flash. Some of the courses also contain Director movies. They work just fine in Mozilla and Firefox with the appropriate plugins whether on XP or Linux.
What's the reasoning behind this? You work online, but what difference does it matter what browser I use or OS?
Also, is it just open source browsers? So browsers such as Opera would be fine?
What about OSX and Apple's browser? This should be a given since OSX is on top of Mach...which itself was developed at Carnegie-Mellon.
I just checked their site on system requirements:
Operating System
* PC: Microsoft Windows 98, ME, 2000, or XP
Web Browser
* PC: Internet Explorer 6.0 with Service Pack 1 or newer, or Netscape Navigator 7.02 or newer
Interesting. I tested my system, which is Linux running Firefox. Everything passed except for only it not being on Windows nor IE/Netscape 7.
Oh well...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Carneige Mellon is unique just like every University in the world.
Everything seems to work fine for me. I'm using Mozilla Firefox in Linux. I don't get the MS Windows/IE 6 requirements. Oh well.. whatever.. not like I've ever listened to system req's before...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Going to classes for material that I can better teach myself has kept me from going back to college in the first place.
I guess more people still feel better going to classes to learn than just teaching themselves the material.
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
Perhaps I'm a bit of an idealist, but I feel this is a monumental break through in our society. This could very well be one of the major turning points; when education becomes a life long venture for more than just an elite few. Almost something of a trendy, and accessible thing to do, like Yoga or Salsa Lessons. Perhaps people consider the ease of options and prestigue a good combination, and people evolve there education patterns to a continue cycle..
Sure beats the "norm" of High school -> College / University -> Job.
It would be excellent to see this pattern break.
Priceless Photos | Complete CCTV Security Cameras
Gamblers Forum
I think a lot of posters here are hung on thinking that online learning == lecture notes, webcasts, and other non-interactive material. This project seems to be going a lot further... They're providing interactive cognitive tutors that are based on solid research into how people learn.
Unlike all of the projects that have been mentioned in this forum, the purpose of providing online courses here is not just to make the information available but to do research on how people learn.
Is my operating system supported? NO
...
Is my web browser supported? NO
Checked out the statistics course - OS requirement is Windows. Oh well, I'll just have to remain an ignorant Fedora user.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
My fiance graduated from CMU, from their masters in Human Computer Interaction. She researched intelligent tutors for a while. They can make things better than 1-on-1 tutors.
The guy funding both projects from CMU & MIT, was far more impressed with CMU's program. It isn't about just lobbing material on the web; it's about teaching people.
So in this case, look for quality and not quantity.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Slashdot,
Each of the OLI courses has a different set of browser and operating system requirements. In general, only the Java, Flash, and Director plug-ins are required. All of the courses have been tested against IE and Mozilla (Netscape, Firefox, etc...). With few exceptions (e.g. a statistic tutor which only runs from IE) the courses can be accessed from an open source platform using Mozilla / Firefox.
The 'Test and Configure' pages, at present, do not reflect this fact. The configuration instructions were designed to aid the majority of users, greater than 90% of which are accessing the courses from Windows.
As an aside, the software behind the OLI project (with few exceptions) was built from and runs using Open Source software. Many of the content authors also use open source tools (emacs, ant, xalan, xerces, etc.)
Who cares about getting credit? I've got a whole inbox full of institutions willing to grant me degrees!
next to nothing. The problem is that we are proliferating our knowledge freely and that means that the value of our knowledge is worth very little since everyone now has an access to it. If I were going to CMU or MIT I'd be really pissed that someone is getting the same education as me but they're not paying $20K a year.
This is why Indians and Chinese have caught up with us and have managed to increase the supply of well educated people who will work for next to nothing.
Just great... for large corporations. We'll continue working for less and less... what's the base salary for a programmer now? $40K?
Humans have been sharing their knowledge ever since they showed each other how to start fires, how Greeks scientists would hold free lectures in their halls, since friends taught each other how to skateboard, shoot slingshots, and play basketballs, and even here on the Internet where people are free to share their unique knowledge to benefit the good of society.
What you advocate is the restriction of knowledge where only an elite few is allowed to know how to do something.. Sorta like returning to the days of pre-renaissance society where only elite church members were given the courses in reading and writing. Everyone else was forced through their own igorance to be subserviant to the elite.
People are going to have to cope with the fact that there are plenty of people who are not in our country who can become just as bright as we are and do it asking for much less money. Is this bad for us? Yes. But like every economic crisis that hits our country, we have managed to find some way to innovate and come out ahead.
Have you ever thought of finding some way to bring your self ahead of the pack? Have you considered pursuing knowledge in a different field?
I don't like what is happening to our jobs either, but I would take a lost job over your concept of restricting knowledge any day.
Well, free education doesn't lower the value of the degree, as it's a certificate that you really know what you are doing. Here in finland education is free all the way (the schools are funded by tax) and I'm currently studying at Helsinki University of Technics, and the governament is giving us students all kinds of benefits so it is more like the governament is paying us to study...
Even with this and the fact that with most of the lecture anyone can walk in as there is almost no control about it.
"We offer support for OS XXX and browser YYY" is not the same as "our course can not be viewed using OS AAA and browser BBB."
I know reading is hard for most slashdot submitters and readers, but try sometimes.
The fact that CMU says that linux is not supported is not the same as the submitter's
"Sadly, the courses are not supported on any open source platforms or even any open source web browsers."
Let's try just one more time for the slow:
Linux is not supported by CMU" and "the courses are not supported on Linux" are not equivalent statements.
I just want to know if you make the same mistakes in your programming.
And what would that language happen to be ;)
-- Posted from my parent's basement
At PSU, where I did my Ph.D., professors were being "invited" to develop entire courses to be offered over the Internet. They would receive course development funds, extra graduate teaching assistants, and in some cases research assistants. Sounds great, right?
What wasn't entirely clear (unless you read the fine print), was that once the course was developed, Penn State owned it. They could keep giving it (for money) for all eternity, and never pay the prof another dime. The only overhead for them was the webspace and processing (pff!) and a pittance for the wage-slave grad students and adjuncts hired to slog through tons of grading, e-mail hand-holding, etc.
I don't think either of the free course programs discussed here have quite the same aims or effect, but they are still part of a larger trend.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
The problem is that we are proliferating our knowledge freely and that means that the value of our knowledge is worth very little since everyone now has an access to it.
All the information is in libraries and bookstores. If you want the information, a college bookstore will sell books to non-students, and even the notes for many subjects are available online, even outside stuff like this. But people who really understand the material are few and hard to find, and all the availability in the world isn't going to change that. At best, it will let a determined and intelligent student learn something without a college class, and I find that something hard to be upset about.
Rice University in Houston, TX has started a new "Connexions" project. The basic idea is that professors can post freely-available lectures, homework-sets, and eventually entire courses. In Rice's CS program, some professors teach their entire courses from Connexions. The materials are released under the Creative Commons license.
As someone who is paying CMU's $40K/yr cost ($20K? I wish!), I have to say that I'm very glad that CMU is doing this - it is because of open access to information that I realized I wanted to be a CS major, and having access to all sorts of resources has helped me a lot here. Classes aren't everything, and information is a very small part of what I'm paying for. I'm paying to have it presented to me well; I'm paying to have advisors who will suggest what I should be learning; I'm paying for professors who will give me individual attention if I'm not understanding something; I'm paying for CMU's wonderful social environment and the experience of being surrounded by people who share my interests. I'm not going to get all of that online.
I was wondering why the hell OLI supported Netscape but not Firefox, so I decided to see what happened when I tried to use one of the courses. I went to Economics, and then the page to test for compatibility, and was told everything was good except for my choice in browser. When I went to see what would happen if I tried to use the course anyway (by hitting back on my browser to get to the TOC) Firefox lost its ability to talk to the internet. I Alt+F4'ed to close it, and then when reopening found that my profile was currently in use, and had to kill firefox.exe which was still running.
I've reproduced the problem on my machine (WinXP, Sun JVM), can anyone else?
I teach physics and astronomy courses at RIT. All my lecture notes are freely available to anyone. Look at
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
Enjoy.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Well, my friend, when I went to CMU, I paid just about $20K/year so that's where that figure comes from. $40K/year figure would be justified if it enabled you to get a well paid job after you graduate. Since you'll incur around $160K worth of debt by the time you graduate and your salary will be crap for years to come and you'll have to constantly worry about the possibility of losing your job to some place overseas, I have a really hard time judging whether the cost is really worth it. I think it will take you decades to pay off that debt. In any case, I wish you well!
Rice University started creating new course material for their Electrical Engineering department five or six years ago. Their Connexions Project now seems to be used for a few courses from half a dozen other colleges as well. If you start flipping through the content, keep in mind you'll need the MathML fonts for Mozilla or a MathML plugin for IE; otherwise many of the pages are going to render hideously or incompletely.
The professors aren't sweating it. In fact, if this system replaced their classes altogether, almost none would complain.
The vast, vast majority of professors are employed by the university to do research. Teaching is an unfortunate but necessary annoyance.
social environment... sorry, found that amusing.
CMU is cheap because it has to be. CMU's per-student endowment is roughly 1/5th of MIT's. If you want plush perks, get into an Ivy League school; if you simply want to learn how stuff works, come to CMU.
No, I don't work for Alumni Relations.
Reduce the number of colours to, like, how many different colours of felt pen you used, and then convert the images to PNG. Then perhaps we can hope to download the lecture notes faster than we could actually read them.
i keep wanting to take your intro to modern physics course, but i would be suffering to take it at 8am. this is the only course i see at RIT that is almost always only offered at 8am. is there a reason?
- tristan
Well, all that work in High School that I did to try to get into Carnegie Mellon (I will be there in the fall) apparently was wasted, since I could have taken the courses online. And to think that I could have spent the last four years playing "nethack". Oh, well, if any of you other slashdoters will be in in Pittsburgh this August, drop me a line or send an e-mail (bohan lon @ andrew . cm u.ed u (remove spaces, duh)). $42,000 down the proverbial drain.
+1 on everything you said from another CMU student.
Also:
The 251 problem sets and solutions may all be online, but the many hours you spend working on them with other CS students to solve those problems is not freely available. The best "tricks" you can learn come from peers, and you can't freely download peers off the net.
I realize that, but if Google can hand out 1 GB for free, and Microsoft can operate Hotmail as a free email service, one would think that CMU could handle a couple megs per alumnus. This is not a big cost, and plenty of other universities do it.
I mean, whenever someone *uses* the durn thing, they get free press. Wouldn't you want it to be widely known that [insert famous scientist] went to your university? It's the cheapest form of advertisment that a university can possibly get (and bandwidth and storage costs *keep* dropping, so it keeps getting cheaper over time). It encourages people to use their CMU box and thus gives Alumni Relations a reliable route to contact people to hit them up for money.
Honestly, a lot of people I know at CMU dearly love their schools, but few people like the university administration.
May we never see th
I guess the online courses are good for woring people. However I don't think one should substitute a college experience (undergrad or grad) if they can afford to go to school. Access to facilities (including access to the large aomount of literature), the competitive environment and chance to interact with faculty are invaluable. Most Universities have accounts with a lot of technical Journals and one get access to numerous publications for free. Also it is difficult to come up with research ideas when you are not in a research environment.
The link posted here: http://www.cmu.edu/ does not work, however http://cmu.edu/ does.
Mohahah!
I tried to get some useful information from several computer science courses from the MIT, and found them to be completely unusable. People are publishing their slides or (worse) the short memos they use while presenting those slides. It's just like publishing the list of figures of a good book and saying: look, the book is online.
On the other hand, CMU people are doing a better job with their online stuff. One has a chance of really understanding the basic notions of, say, statistics. Too bad they don't have computer science stuff.
Sites like UMTV and MIT's OCW have interesting video lectures online, but they are, like every other comparable site I know, always in streaming format. That is, not downloadable. But streaming video sucks big time.
Does anyone know of sites that have downloadable video recordings of lectures? I would be especially interested in c. s., psychology and linguistics.
I am on Mac OS 10.3.4, running Camino browser. Although my system did not pass their "tests," I was able to use all tools in the courses.
Computer Science introductions are freely available over the faculty servers (in German though). For example Informatik I and II and others are here: http://porta.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/electure/k urs.php
There is much more but mostly hidden somewhere. Just ask and you'll find out more.
OK, slightly OT:
Is there any OS content management / creation systems available? Having one would help bring content online, if only beacuse soemone would avoid teh steep fees for licenses.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The Astro segment on limb darkening is great! Especially the part about gravitational lensing by a binary star.
I have a poor bastard working for me, and I'm trying to get him a raise to 25K per year. He started at 18K.
FYI I'm a Senior Engineer/Project Manager with an SCBCD, and SCWCD, making 50K. They HMFIC of the contract bills be out as an Analyst II because it keeps the contract costs down. I'm just hoping some PhD doesn't come around and want my job for 40K
I wonder how marketable a PMP is?
Thank you for your interest in our project and for your suggestions. Each
of the OLI courses has a different set of browser and operating system
requirements. In general, only the Java and Flash, plug-ins are required
for all the courses and Director plug-in is required for The Causal
Reasoning Course. All of the courses have been tested against IE, Netscape,
Mozilla and Firefox. With few exceptions (e.g. a statistic tutor which only
runs from IE) the courses can be accessed from an open source platform
using Mozilla / Firefox.
The 'Test and Configure' pages, at present, do not reflect this fact. The
configuration instructions were designed to aid the majority of users,
greater than 90% of which are accessing the courses from Windows. The
instructions were our attempt to keep technical instructions simple for
many users who are intimidated by too many options in technical
requirements. We are looking at updating the test and configure pages to
better communicate with users who are using a greater variety of browsers
and Operating Systems.
We invite you to become part of our user testing community by using the
courses on your configuration and letting us know what works and what
doesn't and we will post the information and attempt to make the courses as
compatible with as many configurations as possible.
As an aside, the software behind the OLI project (with few exceptions) was
built from and runs using Open Source software. Many of the content authors
also use open source tools (emacs, ant, xalan, xerces, etc.)
Kind Regards,
Candace Thille
Project Director
Open Learning Initiative
Carnegie Mellon University
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I've found very little of use or interest at MIT's site. There are a large number of other universities that have better online resources.
Although, frankly, I think it should be compulsory for all universities to put all their lecture notes online - for everyone, not just existing students. They're (partly) funded by the public purse, part of their remit should be to provide knowledge to the public!
I mean, really, how hard is it to upload a few PDFs?
C'est la vie in the CMU administration. I remember when I applied they were at least a month late in giving me their decision. And when they gave me their student info packet, they just hinted at the date they wanted it back. The things we do to get into a good school. CMU SCS baby!
I have troubles imaging a system like this providing the same quality of experience as taking a real course with a professor you can talk to in person and etc.
But I shan't judge.
clifgriffin > blog
This is my first post to this thread (although I see others have included my voice in conversation by pasting some of my email responses to the thread). I am the project director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. I am thrilled that slashdot has taken an interest in our project. I will continue to respond to all of the emails that people send me directly. I'd also be happy to engage in a public conversation in slashdot on questions or comments that anyone would like. I'll hang back though and not insert my voice in this great discussion unless someone asks for it. Again thank you for your interest and thank you to whoever posted the original article, we were a somewhat unknown little project before Saturday.