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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."
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.
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.
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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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?
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.
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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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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
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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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.
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.
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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.)
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.
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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