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Stanford Classes Now Available on iTunes
Chowser writes "Forbes is reporting Stanford University is now offering a wide range of content on iTunes. From the article: 'In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute "Stanford on iTunes" are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.'" Talaper noted the Official Apple Page on the program is up as well.
99 cents per lecture, get your ONLINE degree from iTunes today
Of the 500 available tracks, only 39 are lectures. The rest are sports, music, and random "Heard on campus" tracks that look like a blog. The available lectures look pretty cool though.
Glad to see other universities are following the trend set by MIT with their OpenCourseWare project. It's interesting to see universities have faith that putting this content out for public consumption will not detract from their mission.
Bradley Holt
By the sounds of it, they will be free as in beer and speech. The big notch universities tend to set information free like that for the public.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Also consider that Stanford is a private university, not public.
Meanwhile the Vatican is defending copyrighting the Pope's pronouncements. Which, IMHO, is right up there with copyright of MLK's 'I Have A Dream' and Co$'s copyrighted "Trade Secrets"
Nice move ya floppy tree :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Good deal. Sounds like a nice counterpart to MIT's OpenCourseWare.
This guy's the limit!
First of all, this has been around at Stanford since October 2005. This was covered at Ars Technica a month and a half ago (including the Stanford on iTunes site and store).
Second, this is also available at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, as well as other schools, such as UC Berkeley.
What's actually "new" here is that Apple has productized this service for educational institutions in the form of iTunes U, announced yesterday.
Though those who haven't heard of it before may be interested in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford.
Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).
I already *paid* the $31,200 tuition you insensitive clod!
Harvard Extension, the night school at Harvard University, is experimenting with podcasting too. While a much smaller project, I look forward to a future where I can download official audio from classes that I missed due to illness or work schedule conflicts. And kudos to Stanford for opening up access to education and knowledge to the public.
Without the piece of paper, the education is meaningless :)
My experience in college has been that a teacher spends most of his/her time helping a relatively small minority of a class. So it would seem reasonable that the rest of the students could learn as much, or more, in a class using pre-recorded lectures over the internet.
I would like to see this lead to a fairly nice public education model where online universities that are publicly subsidized allow students to take classes for free, and then the student pays for the teacher's time when he/she needs that extra help.
Making the content available is all positive for these universities. If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford. In the end there's value in the degree because it certifies your knowledge. If you go for a job interview, etc, and say I downloaded Stanford's coursework from ITunes, I rather doubt they'd consider me on par with a Stanfor graduate.
It's a good thing for them because it builds their image. It shows an interest in promotion education in general and sharing knowledge with those who cannot afford the $30K+. It also gives prospective students a chance to see what that money would be going for before they shell it out. So really all around a good thing for them.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This is a great and an idea I would definately invest time and money in. Had it non been on iTunes only. Way to alienate those of us who refuse to own the trendy, overpriced iPod and/or use their iTunes software.
C'mon Stanford, get with the program and offer this at different outlets. Again, something i'd love to pay for, but because of it not being in a widespread distribution method, i'll just download it free.
Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).
Demios and Phobos are the moons of Mars (Terror and Fear, respectively)
Man, when I first read the headline, I thought they were teaching about iTunes. That would be a popular class.
And no coursework, no grades, and no degree.
The value of these classes with a few exceptions is to demonstrate your competency to get in the school, complete the courses, get the degree - not to demonstrate that you heard a bunch of lectures.
The music? Well...I liked it, but sorry Stanford - it's mostly very derivative and most bands seem to be directly pretending to be another cmmercial one. What happened to colleges doing new forms of music and experimental stuff?
Cheers,
Ian
CH34P UN1VER$1TY D3GR33$!! Get a univer$ity degr33 w0rking from h0me! N0t k1dd1ng! More info at http://www.apple.com/
A good project: develop an open-source way to transmit and store presentations in a useful and navigatable form. Lectures need three streams - the audio, the presenter's face, and the graphics. The graphics need to be at much higher resolution, and should be sent as clean still images when possible. One output should be a web page, with thumbnails for the graphics and clickable audio segments. Then you can find something in the lecture when you need it.
The presentation should be run through a voice recognition system, to make the voice searchable. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough for search. Similarly, OCR the graphics and pull keywords from them.
I was thinking just the other day that a system - say P2P based or whatever - that allowed students to upload their own personal recordings of lectures/classes would be a great idea. If you missed a class - sure would be nice to go to a site and download it from a recording one of your fellow students made. Etc.. Etc...
.com boom and now are too freakin busy to go back to school and finish a degree could at least listen and learn a few things.
With the added benifit that people like me that dropped out to take obscene salaries during the
Education and knowledge seem to have no value- it's only the degree and the name at the top of the certificate which has any currency...
Universities have ample server space and bandwidth to transfer audio files (especially heavily compressed ones at that) to their students. It'd be super easy for any University worth its salt to create a central repository that students (and possibly others) can access via a standard web browser in order to download some encoded audio files (perhaps ones that might even play on non-windows/apple OSes)
:P
The only reason I can think why they would want to do this is if they are getting a bunch of $$$ from apple somehow because this is almost forcing college kids to go out and buy apple compliant hardware if implemented on a mass scale...slippery slope people...we don't want our educational institutions to lock up knowledge in a proprietary service like this.
My professors can figure out how to post lecture slides as pdf files on the class web page. Surely they could post an mp3 or ogg if they so desired. It's probably less hassle than dealing with this itunes u service. It just baffles me that this even exists because all a podcast is is audio and an RSS feed, both things that any university could roll on their own if they wanted.
MIT's open course ware is a step in the right direction because it's available to everyone and is platform independent. Why lock in to itunes when you can get the freedom of posting things yourself?????
I can see it now...10 years from now a new iPod paired with a "trusted computer" will be included in the tuition price of every college student entering university to ensure that they can became drones of Apple, inflate Apple's stock price, and kill any chance that a student would use some sort of open operating system....er umm, i mean... listen to required lectures..yes children, this is to make it easy for you to listen to lectures...not so we can control your purchasing habits....yup.
Text books extra?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library."
Is it just me, or is the url to the lectures missing?
Yeah... so what? College is about networking with soon-to-be successful people who might give you a leg up in your career choice. Sometimes, for some people, it's about being a research assistant on some cutting edge technology. Otherwise it's a glorified repository of information like... like a library! Who would have thought! I have an honorary degree in CS from Stanford. Rather than waste my time and money at the school, I interacted off campus with the researchers I was interested in, submitted my own paper to be published, and... ahem... that was that. I once heard a comedian say that if you are an economics major, you should quit after your first class (with the knowledge that college is a horrible investment of that amount of money). Local TV broadcasts of local college classes has been around (AND FREE!) for years all over the world. Some of these topics remind me of the bland herd mentality that kept me at a distance from "conditioned" students. Flagging this as flamebait would be like a screeching pod-person.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
Sounds like an excellent way to keep both these "church's" pronouncements from spreading more quickly than they would otherwise.
And all along I'd been thinking that the whole point of a church was to convert as many people to your cause as possible because the world will be so much better once that happens. And yes, MLK was a preacher, so the term "church" applies to him as well.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I just downloaded the "How to use public funds to create and spin off a private company", or "we_made_a_bundle_on_google.mp3"
If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford.
Are any of Knuth's lectures available?
(I don't think anybody was seriously looking at iTunes as a rival to the UK's Open University program, where they've been doing remote broadcasts of lectures for a long time now.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I like that Universities may now make it even easier to learn on your own instead of wasting your time in school. I routinely go to course websites at MIT, University of Illinois (I live in the state), and other colleges to basically take the classes along with the students.
They usually have quizes and homework posted along with solutions, and rarely have any passwords to get the information. I also can sometimes download blackboard screenshots, lecture notes, and even recordings of lectures. Sure beats sitting in class. And since I already run a company I dont need a peice of paper that says I am smart, so there is no need to go to college again.
I guess if I ever decided to do some kind of research I could go back to college and actually finish this time, but I am in no hurry.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student.
Funny, that's exactly the way I felt about college when I went on tour with the Grateful Dead.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I see a lot of comments to the effect of "The education itself is valueless; the degree is all that matters", and I'm somewhat taken aback. Surely employment is an important goal, and surely education can serve that goal, but is there no curiosity in your soul? Do you have no desire to learn just to find out why? Am I the only one who just wants to *know*, even if it doesn't directly increase my momentary monetary market value? I still maintain that a thinking human being is more than a paycheck or a dollar sign. Learning feeds the mind the way food feeds the body and love feeds the soul. I say to all of the above mentioned "free-learning" endeavors: "Awesome stuff! Keep up the good work!"
And in the end, even my incidentally and casually acquired knowledge improves my long-term viability in the job marketplace, and improves my image with my co-workers and bosses. It's hard not to like someone who is *truly* fascinated with whatever it is that gets you going.
Thinking outside my Head
...why these aren't on Apple's servers, via ITMS? I mean, if we're going to do it, why not do it right.
Somehow, I think that the $31,000 tuition figure is out of date by quite a few years.
I go to a public school, and it's almost that much. Most of the privates are somewhere in the high 40s. The cost of education in America today is appaling especially if you're from a state that lacks a decent higher-education system.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Is this available in Europe too? Or will we be excluded again like with every other cool content on iTunes Music Store (none of the TV series are available in Europe :(
I found a few that criticise US foreign policy, and I'm selling the recordings to that conservative dork I read about the other day!
You almost have it right. The idea of such organisations as religions and Co$ is the control of how the information is disseminated.
Education in reading was originally encouraged by churches so the followers could read the verse. Problems started when the flocks came to different interpretation or change of emphasis (i.e. this part is actually more important than that part) on the messages in the texts.
If Co$ were to open all their materials then the public would undoubtably have a field day with the wild ideas behind the "faith" Can't say I see that happening any decade soon.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Virtually all of Stanford's EE and CS courses have been available on-line with streaming video for the past several years. Of course you have to pay a subscription or be on-campus to access them, but http://scpd.stanford.edu/ has them all there. The production is excellent: they have a dedicated producer who sits through each class and zooms/rotates/switches cameras to make sure that the lecturer and all the notes are captures. They also take higher-resolution captures and put them next to the video so you can make out figures more clearly. It's all done with Windows Media Player, but it works surprisingly well.
No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student.
No need to join an a cappella group, go to dorm meetings, fulfill political correctness requirements, or complain about how the Band / Gaieties / Chaparral / Psych 1 was so much funnier my freshman year? Oh, if only we'd had iTunes 20 years ago...
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/01/15.html# a1371
While you can get a good education at almost any college, and be forced to get one to a greater or lesser degree depending on how rigorous the curriculum is, the tuition pays for the credential: a Bachelor of Science from Stanford means a lot more to potential employers than "I listened to all the lectures and did all the problem sets required for a Stanford degree. No really, I did!"
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Most elite private colleges are charging around $31,000/year in tuition and fees, give or take a thousand.
Perhaps you mean tuition PLUS room and board? Yes, then you're getting into the low $40's; but in general you can avoid that after your freshman year in most colleges by living off-campus.
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The biggest differences seem to be that a lot of the iTunes material is audio only, is not examinable material, but is available on the Internet. (There would be nothing to stop the BBC from simulcasting the OU material over the Internet - NASA Select does - but the BBC aren't always guilty of having much in the way of intelligence.)
I see the future of "extramural" education of this kind as being Internet-based but much more along the OU lines in terms of quality of material and the option of taking an examination at the end.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
According to this article, they were the first University to do so.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Everyone does iTunes podcasting, it's simple to set up and deploy. The University of Oregon, on the other hand, makes a lot of campus lectures and events available as a video feed: http://media.uoregon.edu/
There is no single class lecture on iTunes on Stanford's page. The faculty lectures are public-access lectures that have been recorded (audio-only) on campus and contain no class information. The "Heard on Campus" part is a bunch of PR material that has shown up on iTunes, including speeches by famous people (Steve Jobs, the Dalai Lama, etc.) and Stanford presidential speeches for all of you into that kinda thing. The entire presentation is a massive PR stunt between Apple and Stanford U. So, you can take the hype and chuck that as well...
And as for the free content for UC Berkeley courses, we have only 100-level (or lower) classes which are basically prerequisites for a UC Berkeley education. I'm sorry to say that if you were looking for course content, you'll need to look elsewhere.
So this leaves MIT, which actually does have a lot of content (although it depends on what is put up by the professor), like this page if you are interested in Computer Language Engineering (upper-level, apparently).
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Forbes is a bit late on the story. TG Daily ran an article about Stanford's itunes project back in early November. http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/11/04/stanford_itunes/
Almost all of the content is directed towards alumni to help them maintain a "connection" with the school. The lectures are NOT class lectures, but lectures from professors on specific topics. While still interesting, I don't see any actual student classes being offered via iTunes.
This is wisdom of the ages friends.
I personally made a very foolish mistake in college by attending a less prestigious school over a much more prestigious one.
I paid my way through university. At the time I was furious that they were teaching me things I had learned in community college. Same text books, similar lectures, only the professors would blather on about their research which had little to do with the subject of the day.
So I left. I felt I got a better education, but boy it doesn't show on paper. To this day I think I would have gotten better career opportunities (at least an interview) by sticking with that horrible school.
Knowledge is free. The school name on the diploma most certainly is not.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This is excellent news for the public at large. Even though this is a private university, there is still a lot of public money which gets funnelled into it (think of all the research funding, and more), so its nice they are giving something back.
That said, I don't think the optimum content is to simply record a lecture. The audio medium is quite different than a lecture hall, and thus the content really needs to be tailored to the medium in order for it to be effective. The same goes for most technical content. You can't just read a book into a microphone and expect your readers to understand what you are saying. You really need to start from scratch with the audio medium in mind. Also, I am really tired of all the umhhhs and ahhhs on most podcasts, and really look forward to the day of professional quality audio content (like the stuff we are working on!).
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Maybe a few years down the road we could get some video with this? In class lectures while being able to see whats being put on the board would would be great.
Statements like that are why the education system in many Western countries is in such a state.
Holy generalizations. And bad ones at that. (a state of what?)
No longer do people pursue degrees for the love of the subject, they just want a nice piece of paper to wave in front of possible employers.
The point of college *is* to make yourself more employable.
It's a shame that for many personal achievement is now a distant second to what other people think of the letters after your name.
I'm proud of both my education and the fact that I provide well for my family. I was smart enough to do both, and not just one.
If I am learning for the sake of learning - and I do it regularly - I don't sit down and listen to a recorded lecture. I explore. My degree is in aerospace engineering. My interests also lie in other fields. Like robotics. I program AVR's. I play with digital image processing. I read papers by professionals, who I can then get in contact with regarding questions. I attend graduate school. I attend **real classes** and conferences (even unrelated to my field of work) where I can experance interactive education. Communing with people is where it is at.
Listening to recorded lectures is stupid. It is a one-way communication. Learning is a two-way street both for the student and the professor.
This is a shameless plug, but it's on-topic.
I've been recreating my law school lectures at the University of Cincinnati (where I am a first-year student focusing on copyright and technology law). Instead of recording the raw lecture audio, and dealing with the copyright and privacy concerns, I've been taking detailed notes, adding my own analysis, and capturing new creative expression. (Yes there are still some copyright issues, but my lawyer and I are in agreement that what I am doing does fall under Fair Use.) This new creative expression is then placed under CC-Attribution and the GNU FDL so others can do new and innovative things with it.
I recorded roughly one 15-20 minute episode per lecture, with about 40 lectures in each of my four substantive classes.
My episodes are available for manual download and in podcast format through the iTunes Music Store (search for "Life of a Law Student"). This semester I have recruited some additional students to come on board. This way we can expand to other law schools and to undergraduate law / political science courses.
Here is the site, and I am still looking for students to help. Additionally, if you have technology skills (this is Slashdot after all), I need volunteers as we revamp our back-end software and deal with an influx of new material.
Contact me if you are interested in being a part of this.
- Neil Wehneman
P.S. For those who are wondering if my "re-lectures" are credible, I scored a 3.77 GPA last semester. Although I don't get my class rank for a few more days, I've been told by the administration that this should land me in the top 10% of the class.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
So you're posting on /. using only the power of your mind?
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
In the late 80s- early 90s Stanford had a fair number of "TV classrooms" used for interactive classes, with some of the students participating via satellite link. There was outbound video and audio and inboard audio for remote students to ask questions. I don't know how things are today, but then the classrooms had little microphone handsets at the desks, so when you asked a question, you had to press the button so that people out in "TV land" could hear your question. Some faculty asked at the beginning of class, "Anyone out there in TV land today?" and there would be a pause, then a cackling "Hello from Monolithic Memory in Boise, Idaho" or more often, someone from a local valley firm. So there would occassionally be questions from those students and some genuine participation. These were mostly for low-level grad classes with big enrollments and I think it worked well for the companies- they could pay (generously) for engineers getting masters degrees without the hassle of them leaving their company office complex. So it didn't interrupt their workday much, certainly not as much as going from Idaho to Palo Alto would do!
or you could get better lectures from the modern scholar or the teaching company they have been doing this for years. yes there classes are on tape or cd or audio dvd ... but you can rip them to your ipod.
yes you can take a voluntary final exam.
and yes you can wonder why folks would pay 50,000 a year for a liberal arts degree when you can procure better lectures online for free.
Its good to see Stanford opening up there knowledge base to the public. I'm working on a project that is a little more accessible than that. http://www.globalizationstudies.org/ The lectures are available as high quality h264 on itunes and on the website for free with a creative commons license. Link to itunes. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/ viewPodcast?id=118462187&s=143455
The classes are broadcast live too. Class #3 starts tonight at 6pm MST and runs for 3 hours.
The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes the six schools involved:
Over the past year, Apple has worked with six institutions to test the service: Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Universities also have the option of integrating the with local directory and authentication systems, requiring users to authenticate before use. This way, content can be restricted only to people affiliated with the university, students taking a particular class, or the general public.
During the test phase, this project was codenamed "Indigo". The service also features tools for easily creating, aggregating, and deploying content to the iTunes "store" for each school. It's a very attractive service because it takes advantage of a service many students are already familiar with (iTunes and iPod), uses an emerging technology that is perfect for continuously updated audio or video broadcasts on a topic (podcasting), and makes it easy for participating institutions to publish their content without having to build a service themselves or maintain infrastructure.
At the risk of getting a little bit off-topic for this particular message topic - I *do* expect businesses to carefully read resumes that are submitted to determine if they "know what they're talking about" or not. That's one reason you see so much inefficiency in business today! Most managers claim they "don't have time" to go through their job applicants - so they've done things like let the H.R. department "pre-screen" everybody for them. Effectively, that amounts to saying "Here - throw away a bunch of these incoming resumes for me, will you? I don't want a stack of 75 to look at. I want 10." H.R. is hardly more effective than trained monkeys at correctly determining who deserves an interview and who doesn't, in areas outside Human Resources itself! What does you average H.R. employee know about I.T. or engineering, or biotech, or accounting, or . So sure, they just look for "keywords" on resumes that match words mentioned in lists of "required skills", and use the "has one/doesn't have one" test for college degrees to decide what goes in the "round file".
Of course you'll get a lot of unqualified people trying to apply for jobs they have no business doing! But IMHO, a manager's *most important task* may be evaluating candidates for hire! It's a crying shame they don't tend to view it this way! Labor is the single largest expense for any business - so start giving it a little more attention!
I know, working in I.T. myself, I was occasionally asked to look over a few resumes submitted for PC support type jobs. When I did so, I was pretty quickly able to make a determination as to a person's basic level of knowledge. I've seen quite a few people claim a 4 year degree on their resume, yet they had spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes in their cover letter and other such things, indicating they probably don't have the strongest writing skills. To me, that's a bigger reason to trash a resume than not having the degree on it. What else did they do? Do they illustrate a willingness to learn outside the workplace? (AKA. Any "personal projects" listed on a resume like, say, setting up a Linux server at home to learn how it interoperates with their Windows PC?) Which technologies do they claim experience with? Just a regurgitation of the most common ones they think employers want to see (MS Office, Project, Visio, etc.), or do they actually list things you wouldn't run across unless you were doing something a little more in-depth/advanced with computing? (EG. HP OpenView/Manage-X, or advanced backup software)
Rice University has created a similar system at http://cnx.rice.edu/ which is meant to be universal. That is, other colleges or universities add content, too. Because it was created in the electrical engineering department it is still focused rather heavily on all things electrical engineering though other disciplines show up.
Disclaimer: I am a Rice University Electrical Engineering undergraduate.
So the /. consensus is it's good to be able to hear lectures from Stanford, but bad to have acess to them at UCLA? It's a joke. Lighten up.
Vote for Pedro
You must be new here, he is referring to a so-called Operating System besides Windows and MacOS. That OS is known as Linux.
:P )
And if it was possible to post on Slashdot using only the power of ones mind; Linux would be the first OS to support it!
(Though the drivers for the mind-computer interface probably would be a bit iffy
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
Complaining about how the O/S you purposely selected doesn't include the features you want is like complaining that a pancake breakfast doesn't come with eggs.
Get over it.
I can't find any content, maybe they are blocking that content for IPs outside the US
The FAQ says that MP3 formats are not (very, widely, ever, etc.) available.
That's the salient point the parent poster is making.
Stanford was still doing this a few years ago. You could even watch classroom lectures online through their stanford online service, which still exists. Of course, only paying students were able to get access to the lectures, but when I was a student there, I was able "audit" a bunch of extra classes from my living room.
Does MIT provide you with a free computer?
Oh. So it's NOT free.
I guess you'll stick with library books, then.
"No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student." That would be right, were it not the case that education has never been about "education" but is really about "signalling".
When you think of it, DRM is not so incompatible with the bible.
The whole tree of knowledge debacle was all about this.
God is all like "No distribution of my IP".
Then the Snake is all like "I haves the 0-day".
And then Eve is all like "Adam, dude, here's a torrent".
Adam to Eve "No way, God will totally rootkit our ass".
Eve back to Adam "Chillax, guy".
Then Adam is like "K".
And God totally kickbans them from the server.
I'm sorry, but the dumbing-down of post-secondary education has gone too far.
Call me an idealist, but I hope to one day see a future where an excellent, updated, free textbook is available for download on every subject, along with an excellent set of learning tools such as lectures. I hope that these, in turn, are used to make the textbooks and lectures even better on a continuing basis. Education is too important for the world to have people restrict its flow for economic reasons.
Between 1995 and 2001, I took almost all of my math courses at home on the computer through EPGY at Stanford. It's good to see that they're still trying keep ahead of the times, although I wish that more places of learning would pick up on the idea.
UC Berkeley recently implemented the hideous Blackboard courseware system. The biggest problem with it is that you -have- to login into it to see the course web site. It's closed to outsiders. Not all course web sites use it (for example CS/EE ones have their own web site) but professors from other departments too. Argh.. so stupid.
the obvious question is, is this material DRMed? if not, is there any way to access other than through itunes? (for us poor linux users?)
http://kered.org
Not quite -- according to a book I'm reading by Carl Sagan, the first guy to try translating the bible into English, Tynedale, was both hanged and burned at the stake for his troubles. Education and religion have been at odds for longer than you might think.
hmmm, would that be the pigskin rather than the sheepskin?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
yes I can see it now
Google automates a fully K1-12 class with 3d avatar teachers and using traditional reading, you cannot (C) knowledge so it wouldnt
be hard to hire 4 teachers per grade level and computerize the whole class texts/tests. English grammer/exams would be more difficult though
even that is 50% A/B/C/D type questions. Think americas army game medical tutor.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
As others have posted this is being done by Stanford, MIT, Wisconsin, Duke, and in some form or other by a list of colleges longer than both your arms. It is happening in the most litigious nation on Earth, where Intellectual Property is sacrosanct, yet Apple can still rake off $0.02 on every deal thru its shop.
:-(
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Apple fanboy from way back. We have the technology, we have the trained personell, faculty are rearin' to go, but on this side of the Pacific we don't have a local iTunes store. We also seem to have a less than pushy local Apple office. The Dept that runs our satellite TV reception streaming on campus went wmv because MS wanted the business and Apple didn't. Are we too small? 30,000 students?
P'raps Apple are tainted with the current epidemic of rancid Political Correctness. Photos in newspapers must be vetted to make sure no student's face is identifiable... We were told to adjust our firewall so our streaming student concerts and class videos did not go off campus. I s'pose in that climate Apple may be right to wait for our lawyers to give them the nod.
Yet on the straight technical side we cannot find answers. We have the legal papers, we have the secure sites, we have the bandwidth, but we do not have the budget for a turnkey end to end ISDN video conferencing solution. We know iChat could do exactly what we want if we could just tweak the audio & video frame and bitrates. Hello Apple? Nobody home
"Here - throw away a bunch of these incoming resumes for me, will you? I don't want a stack of 75 to look at. I want 10."
The problem is, it's not a matter of reducing 75 to 10. For a job I just applied for in my company (and did not get, even though I temped in the position for 10 months), there were more than 5000 applicants.
Let's assume my boss had nothing else to do. How much time should he look at each resume to determine the potential of the applicant? 1 minute? That's 83 hours - or more than 2 solid weeks of work. He has to rely on HR to thin the herd.
Now here's the rub. The company doesn't need to hire the best possible candidate every time to be successful. They'll typically do pretty well if they manage to hire one of the best - even if that person was not the best of the entire field. That person will be "good enough".
So, assume from that 5000, HR first culls out 90% of the applications and carefully considers the remaining 500. Here, based on some kind of scoring system, you have what would most likely be the "A" students. They carefully go through that 500 and narrow it down and eventually make screening calls. When they're done, they hand of a sheaf of 50 applicants. These are the top 1%, or the "A+" students. These are the ones my boss goes through to decide who he'll interview.
Now, of course, in that process you more than likely weeded out some people are extremely qualified, but somehow didn't score as well. In fact, some of those weeded out might be better than some that you left in. But overall, you have a very strong class of candidates to work from. Any one of them is highly qualified and has a good potential to do a good job. It's now up to my boss to work through those candidates and try to find the one that fits best with the organization.
Again, he may have never had a chance to see that "perfect" candidate that got screened out, but he'll most likely end up with someone who's pretty darned good and will still excel in the job.
It would take "perfect information" to find out precisely who, out of those 5000 applicants is the very best. But, the cost of getting perfect information goes up exponentially as you try to zero in on that figure.
So in the end, you have to weigh how much more it costs to use more rigorous screening of those 5000 candidates and compare it to the return you expect to get with the current process. If you have spend another $100,000 to get a deeper level of analysis (maybe phone-screen all 5000 applicants), is there a good chance that the different applicant you end up will make up that $100,000 difference to your company?
It's a trade-off. How much do you invest in the process compared to the return. If you already get a really good return, what is the real incentive to expend a lot more effort?
Of course, from a job-hunter point of view, I hate automated scoring systems that dump me out of the running. But fortunately for me, while my boss did not hire me, he did strongly recommend me to someone else who did hire me.
If you really want into a big corporation, find back-door ways in, like temping. Having personal recommendations and people specifically requesting you as a candidate trumps the automated scoring systems.
Actually, the Pope's writings can be distributed for free if you include the copyright statement and quote them verbatim. The idea is to a) stop publications from leaking them before they are released and b) prevent inacurate copies from circulating.
Jon Udell's recent article, Stanford, meet the lightnet. Apple, get a clue agrees that this is interesting, but too constrained by iTunes. They really need to open things up before this will be a killer app.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
SO how does this explain the Vatican's billing? A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict's speech to the conclave that elected him, and an extract from his enthronement speech, is reported to have been sent a bill for 15,000(£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus "legal expenses" of 3,500.
The article and the summary are very misleading. While there is some fluff through the iTunes protal, real classes are available (for a price) here. The technology is clearly there to both record the classes in a professional way and broadcast them (on campus they are available both over the internet and on TV.) It is very dissappointing to me that Stanford has not opened this up more and made it available for free to the public. I'm still hoping that in the future some administators will see the light and try to do something more like what MIT is doing. The equipment is in place to easily surpass OpenCourseware, if there were the motivation.
I love the idea of making lectures available the public. I recently found these lectures by Richard Feynman online, available for free, and I'm watching them as I get the chance. I hope to keep learning my entire life, and free online lectures will certainly help.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I see this as a good way for more people to introduce themselves to other ideas and ways of thinking. It doesn't seem to be intended as a "free Stanford education," but rather a way for a large group of people to have access to the ideas and types of things that are going on at the University.
If you want to see a pretty cool website devoted to online courses with a lot of collaberation between different places, check out Connexions, hosted by Rice University.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder, when the content of lectures is available to anyone, what value is left in a University education?
The friendships one makes at the University are invaluable.
In the future, will University tuition be regarded as dues to an elite club, even more so than it is today?
Alternately, will the scope of the club expand?
Times online article on this story.
Does this work?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/06003 90.htm
Apparently it was a book not just a few lines.
Wow, do you ever leave the front of the computer?
I'm talking about *real* exposure... like letting a radio station broadcast said materials. (Maybe they don't mind). Internet access isn't free as in beer, especially broadband, and neither are computers. However, radios and televisions? There is plenty more access.
What the fuck do you think this is; South Korea?
And besides, I'm making a statement about educational materials in general. There are plenty of sources out there (MIT's open courseware springs to mind) but it would be nice to see a collaborative between colleges to put this material available for better usage.
Oh wait, that is what the Internet was supposed to do - well, maybe free access should be given away (we do pay taxes that are supposed to do that exact thing!).
Get your Unix fortune now!
I can't tell if your post is sarcastic or serious, but the mods seem to be taking it seriously...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"Math on tape is hard to follow, so: Please Listen Carefully"
As a Harvard grad, I have always dreamed of taking courses at Sanford.
I've never slept so well as when I was a college freshman in a big Intro to European Civilization lecture. The high-ceilinged, dimly lit lecture hall, the comfortable chairs, the gentle baritone of the prof droning on about the economic and demographic causes of the Franco-Prussian war, in a thick Hungarian accent...
iTunes can replicate part of the experience, but you really need the lecture hall and the furniture. Some kind of virtual reality helmet?
Just another form of censorship. In future Books about the Vatican etc. will have to be "proof" read and approved by the Vatican, or they will slap fees upon the authors. In this way the Vatican aims to control 100% of written material on the subject of any Pope. Not a well thought through strategy IMHO.
To all those stanford students that don't know, if you are on a Stanford IP address (or have an account) you can access quite a few neat lectures on http://scpd.stanford.edu I know most of my classes are on there (but I'm in CS).
As it stands I'm rated (Score:1, Flamebait) while someone who misses my entire point in the first place is giving insight?
I work with a good cross section of people and only the younger kids even know what iTunes is. There are a handful of gem people who are well read and actually follow all of the news and know it through that but getting to it would be a daunting task. Computers, for the most part, are only a trend for those who have parents to buy them. Anyone else has an outdated machine or a flea market PC.
It's great - I'm in the discussion because I like the move. I just wish it was available to even more people. Is that so wrong?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Sadly, while colleges should do these things, some of the "best" don't, for example as documented here: www.epinions.com/content_73675148932
I just listened to "Das treffende Wort" (loosely translated: "Putting it aptly"), a podcast of the University of Wisconsin, and was surprised about the bad quality. There were about 10 grammatical errors (wrong declinations etc.) in this short piece of audio, and some phrases sounded just wrong, although grammatically correct ("Mann, alles ging ab!").
Ok, so I've checked itunes music store, where the hell is this content? Maybe I'm missing something, but maybe you need the ivy league education in order to find the right link to it?
No need to pay the $31,200 tuition.
You don't pay tuition, you pay for tuition. Tuition is the education, the learning, the tutoring that you get. And $31,200 (or whatever) is the PRICE of this super-duper quality Stanford tuition.
$META_SIG_JOKE
But it's a stanford education