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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."
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
Really? Ok, so they may not be "courses" but professors in many fields have been putting their lecture notes online long before MIT's program was launched. It is rather trivial to find them.
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.
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.
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Africus aut Europaeus?
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
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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.
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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.
What I have noticed about online lecture notes where they are provided for the courses I have taken during my BA is that professors will usually make printed or online lecture content a contribution to - not by any means a complete summary of - lecture content in general. Video-taped lectures (which many veteran academics and lecturers oppose vehemently) are a separate phenomenon with separate implications. But with regard to online lecture notes, while each individual's experience will vary from institution to institution and lecturer to lecturer, mine has been one in which almost all instructors typically (probably for the most part intentionally) make online and print notes insofar as it is possible an element of course content which would be rendered by comparison completely inadequate on its own.
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.
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.
The university provides an environment in which smart people have the opportunity to interact with other smart people. A professor's main role is to create new knowledge and, by example, to encourage students to acquire and create knowledge, using as resources their professors, their peers, text books, labs, etc.
People who are keen on knowledge are naturally keen to share it, and that's where the value of being a member of a university, student or professor, comes in. Think of it as an intellectual support group.
Professors in general are glad of being relieved of routine lecturing. This frees them to do more research, and to interact with students in more fulfilling ways.
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.
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
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