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."

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Carnegie Mellon removing alumni email boxes

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Yeah, I'm still cranky over the fact that Carnegie Mellon is yanking the email boxes from their alumni (and apparently wasn't going to warn them until a couple of students got active and forced Alumni Relations to say something). It'd be nice if CMU had a bit more regard for their alumni when it comes to things that cost them less than the lousy stuff they hand out during their graduation.

*grumble* lousy CMU.

CMU has some great schools and good folks and administrators in those schools, but when it comes to the university itself, CMU really cheeses me off.