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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."
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)
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.
Quite a number of really excellent courses are already freely available, even if they don't have as much publicity as MIT's OCW.
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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.
here you go.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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.
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.)
A Joke?
My undergrad degree was with the University of Maryland while my graduate degree was from the University of Phoenix. How do I compare the two?
Well the UOP cost quite a bit more at $1500 per class. However, the degree was a gift to myself and my goals were a little different from my BS, where I was just trying to get my foot in the door for a decent job. The UOP classes were smaller, allowing me to actually interact with the faculty. What's more, I noticed no difference in the quality of instruction. Truth be told, I actually worked harder with the UOP, as I had to turn in more written work. Some of my undergrad courses consisted of merely two quizzes and a final.
I attended the UOP simply because my job did not allow me to attend more traditional courses; I worked odd hours.
Is my education worse because I was not lectured to by a TA (yes, that's what you often get) in a top-tier school? No. I learned a lot, primarliy from interaction with other students (the UOP stresses group interaction and projects). This was not a correspondance course, as some of you no doubt believe. It was very much what you would expect of any other institution minus the beer and dorms.
Sure, Google will never hire me but they wouldn't hire 99% of the rest of you, either. Be honest with yourself and consider if the name of the school on the diploma really ever gave you the measure of the man. Remember, Bush went to an Ivy League school. Would you hire him?
I'll finish with this: A lot of us teach ourselves what we need to know on a daily basis from books and code review. University for some of you guys would be a re-hash of old skills learned from an O'rielly book or past project. Do you want to be judged on the merits of where you learned universally-available material? Elitist would say you really know nothing unless it came from a 80-year-old lecture hall.
On-line courses are a good fit for the right student. It's my view it just takes a more motivated, genuinely mature individual to get through them.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
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
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.