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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
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.
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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.)