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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."
It's simple, they won't.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
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
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)
They're currently fine tuning the online beer bong simulator so they can offer as complete an experience online as off.
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.
Most of the class have at best course outlines and HW problems. Very few have lecture notes, very few have solutions to problems. Its like, whats the point?
What is more important, real attendance to school teaches you discipline, something that I believe is difficult to get via Internet. I wonder if the last thing is good or not.
It appears to me that they are simply beta testing these courses on an unsuspecting public. "Available Now: Pilot version of CSR course including Current content, Case studies and Causality Lab 1.0 Available Summer 2004: Pilot version of CSR updated with improved navigation, interactive pseudo tutors and Causality Lab 2.0 which includes a causal model exercise builder." Available Fall 2004: Actual version of CSR updated with payment module accepting PayPal and Credit Cards.
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.
Ya know, learning for learning is fine as far as it goes. But if it doesn't come with credit for a degree, the bookstore is just as good.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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?
Especially for those who work at traditional jobs and are unable to attend physical classes, as well as those of us whose skill sets and geographical dispersal are familiar with networking in nontraditional ways, a well architected online course can accomplish those non-course related goals that you attribute only to physical presence.
I doubt that self-paced instruction can give you that. I think that any technical course that doesn't include chat sessions, discussions of current events and collaborative projects can even provide those non-tangible benefits.
That is now my standard for any program (multi-course, certificate or degree) without that, I'd rather just read the book, thanks.
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
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.
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.
Checked out the statistics course - OS requirement is Windows. Oh well, I'll just have to remain an ignorant Fedora user.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
My fiance graduated from CMU, from their masters in Human Computer Interaction. She researched intelligent tutors for a while. They can make things better than 1-on-1 tutors.
The guy funding both projects from CMU & MIT, was far more impressed with CMU's program. It isn't about just lobbing material on the web; it's about teaching people.
So in this case, look for quality and not quantity.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
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.)
next to nothing. The problem is that we are proliferating our knowledge freely and that means that the value of our knowledge is worth very little since everyone now has an access to it. If I were going to CMU or MIT I'd be really pissed that someone is getting the same education as me but they're not paying $20K a year.
This is why Indians and Chinese have caught up with us and have managed to increase the supply of well educated people who will work for next to nothing.
Just great... for large corporations. We'll continue working for less and less... what's the base salary for a programmer now? $40K?
Humans have been sharing their knowledge ever since they showed each other how to start fires, how Greeks scientists would hold free lectures in their halls, since friends taught each other how to skateboard, shoot slingshots, and play basketballs, and even here on the Internet where people are free to share their unique knowledge to benefit the good of society.
What you advocate is the restriction of knowledge where only an elite few is allowed to know how to do something.. Sorta like returning to the days of pre-renaissance society where only elite church members were given the courses in reading and writing. Everyone else was forced through their own igorance to be subserviant to the elite.
People are going to have to cope with the fact that there are plenty of people who are not in our country who can become just as bright as we are and do it asking for much less money. Is this bad for us? Yes. But like every economic crisis that hits our country, we have managed to find some way to innovate and come out ahead.
Have you ever thought of finding some way to bring your self ahead of the pack? Have you considered pursuing knowledge in a different field?
I don't like what is happening to our jobs either, but I would take a lost job over your concept of restricting knowledge any day.
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
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.
At PSU, where I did my Ph.D., professors were being "invited" to develop entire courses to be offered over the Internet. They would receive course development funds, extra graduate teaching assistants, and in some cases research assistants. Sounds great, right?
What wasn't entirely clear (unless you read the fine print), was that once the course was developed, Penn State owned it. They could keep giving it (for money) for all eternity, and never pay the prof another dime. The only overhead for them was the webspace and processing (pff!) and a pittance for the wage-slave grad students and adjuncts hired to slog through tons of grading, e-mail hand-holding, etc.
I don't think either of the free course programs discussed here have quite the same aims or effect, but they are still part of a larger trend.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
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.
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
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
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.