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Carnegie Mellon Starts Offering Courses Online

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gotta-start-somewhere dept.

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."

7 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. From Open Learning Init. From CMU by herrvinny · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)

  2. Other universities by stroustrup · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Webcasts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Quite a number of really excellent courses are already freely available, even if they don't have as much publicity as MIT's OCW.

    For example: (there are many more)

    Berkeley (Webcasts)
    http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/in dex.html

    University of Washington:
    http://www.uwtv.org/programs/title.as p

  4. Re:A bit of background... by Capt'n+Hector · · Score: 4, Informative

    here you go.

    --
    Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
    Africus aut Europaeus?
  5. Why no open source nor open source browsers? by ScottGant · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  6. Browser Compatibility and Open Source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  7. Want free course material? Take mine ... by StupendousMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    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