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MIT's OpenCourseWare Program
Kent Simon writes "Many people may not know that MIT has initiated OpenCourseWare, an initiative to share all of their educational resources with the public. This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free, open, and available. It's a great resource for people looking to improve their knowledge of our world. OpenCourseWare should prove exceptionally beneficial to those who may not be able to afford the quality of education offered at a school like MIT. Here's a link to all currently available courses. It is expected that by the end of the year every course offered at MIT will be available on the OpenCourseWare site, including lecture notes, homework assignments, and exams. OpenCourseWare is not offered to replace collegiate education, but rather to spread knowledge freely."
Here is a link for HP's free classes:
http://h30187.www3.hp.com/
Who has more?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Don't get me wrong: Having the material available for free is great, even though a large part of the courses are incomplete in that they refer you to the standard literature for reference like most regular university courses will. But this is basically a logistic solution, a lot of knowledge is available today to anybody who can get hold of a library card at the local university and a lot of basic knowledge is no further away than the wikipedia.
But you will find that the number of people studying advanced calculus or Sino-Tibetian languages outside of university courses is small, even though a lot of material is available for free. Learning complex subjects is a process, not just a question of getting the information, and the process (with tutorials and working with other students and asking questions and assignments and so on) is what MIT is still selling, the content of OCW is only a small part of that.
Fortunately OCW is not simply free, but (at least partly) licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing non commercial sharing and remixing (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5). While you may not be able to replicate the experience of studying at MIT, someone may take the content and add e.g. a technical communications layer.
You are into advanced web 3.0 elearning platform development, but have no way to create the content? Take OCW, reuse what they have and give the world a new learning experience? You always wanted to write a shoot-'em up game based on and explaining the principles on quantum physics? You solve the DirectX/OpenGL/game engine magic and compensate your lack of talent as a physics tutor by using parts of 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2006.
These are primitive ideas, but I think about OCW more as a basis on which people can experiment than a library. Libraries have been around for a long time, unfortunately the majority of people don't use them. To reach the masses, you have to somehow turn the content of OCW into something compatible to a game console. Give it a shot!
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
This is brilliant!
This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free, open, and available. It's a great resource for people looking to improve their knowledge of our world.
I'm going to combine this with my OpenGrading program. I predict a 4.0 this semester.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free
My tuition there was in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago. Not complaining. I loved course VI. But free, is not typical MIT style, because as we all know, you get what you pay for.
I must say, they have a very extensive listing, I'm really impressed. But is it wise to post all the exams, including the final? I can only assume that they give the actual students different ones which would relegate the online versions to mere practice. Tons of interesting materials, though. I think I shall enjoy picking through it.
Demented But Determined.
The most amazing thing is Gilbert Strang's linear algebra course. He is a genius lecturer
I'm going to combine this with my OpenGrading program. I predict a 4.0 this semester.
That does not work very well. It's funny how the world takes care of silly tricks like that.
It would be better for you to spend time reading the coursework and apply it to something you do. In engineering, school and grades are a start, achievements are king. You can learn anywhere you are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Many people may not know that MIT has initiated OpenCourseWare [...]"
MIT OpenCourseWare Now Online
On September 30th, 2002 with 179 comments
And more much other older stories.
Animoog.org
I seem to recall downloading some of the OpenCourseWare stuff a year or two ago.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ok, so the content is (and has been) open... mostly (if you can get access to the journal articles and books). Now what some feisty OCW-fanatics should do is to start an OCW-compliant online course discussion / collaboration site, so that people who are interested in working through specific course material can all work together, and discuss, rather than operate, read, etc -- in isolation. After all, learning is a social enterprise... call it an open university...
How effective these resources will be depends largely on the learning style of those who plan to study, but what a great resource to have available. So many people could use it:
a) High school students not challenged by their current materials have somewhere to go.
b) Students at other universities who need additional resources can look here.
c) Those simply looking to learn about the world around them have a low/no cost place to start.
I'm sure there are many, many more. But this, in my opinion, is what colleges should be about - creating a more educated, thoughtful, and critical (in the sense of examining and not simply accepting) population. I'm sorry to see patents and patent revenue becoming such a large part of college/university thinking - if you want to do that, build a commercial research center. Things like this keep hope alive - education for its own sake. There is more to the world than business (although I'm not sure our society remembers that some days) and efforts like this really do make the world a better place.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
HP:MIT :: fat-penguin:F-22
That MIT is providing essentially free knowledge is excellent news. Many intelligent people engage in self-study on various topics and need challenging homework assignments with solutions. Doing exercise problems without solutions means that you could, possibly, learn the material incorrectly and never actually realize your misunderstanding. After all, quantum mechanics is not intuitive.
Your misunderstanding could lead to a malfunctioning nuclear bomb. You want to do it right the first time.
I wonder if this is a move to cater more towards home schoolers.
....including "Operating Systems and Systems Programming" and "Machine Structures" are here. Hopefully these are a good listen.
I've also gotten through most of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures and although there's a lot of chalk-on-blackboard noises that you're not able to see, you can still pick up quite a bit of good info.
The Army reading list
The course itself is not the point of going to college. If you did this instead of taking a course you would be missing out on the interaction with the professor as well as the connections/letters of recommendation you would get if you were actually attending MIT.
On top of that you could take those open courses and understand the material better than anyone, but who do you think an employer is going to hire/grad school is going to admit? The guy who said he went through the open courses on MITs website or the guy who graduated from MIT.
This isnt anything particularly new, you could always go shell out fifty bucks for a textbook and read the thing. Noone would consider that as valuable as a college education though.
One of the sad truths about higher education is that 99% of the time the degree itself and the connections you made in college are far more valuable than anything you actually learned in school.
Another interesting project, albeit with a very low profile so far and just getting started, is Sun's curriki.org. AFAICT it's intended to be a more corporate version of wikibooks (which has been a dismal failure, BTW) -- a wiki for making free textbooks. They prefer to use a the BSD-style CC-BY license, they're focusing on K-12, and it looks like they're not going to let people edit unless they're approved by Sun. (Being at least 18 is a hard requirement.) I guess my expectations for curriki.org are low, based on my own opinion about why wikibooks never got off the ground: basically, a wiki just isn't a good way to write a textbook.
Find free books.
Under what license is this offered? Is the license compatible with GNU - FDL, and could this content be incorporated into Wikibooks or Wikiversity?
http://amishthrasher.blogspot.com/
This is a great way to have knowledge at your fingertips, but unfortunately even if you learned everything on the page, you would have exactly zero credibility, as you wouldn't have gone through the 4-5 years of actual schooling. It'd be great if there were a way to actually get credit for reading and studying this without paying MIT approximately $40,000 a year.
Care about privacy? Read this!
I've used open courseware for a while now to do a few different courses. My University degree was informative, but there were certainly bits of information I missed out on. More importantly, since I graduated from school several months ago, it's been easy to get into the habbit of not thinking too much outside of work, so going through some of the material on OCW has been good for keeping me sharp and learning new things.
The biggest problem that I've found is that the quality varies wildly. Some courses, like the intro to algorithms course, have videos of all lectures, as well as MP3 versions, course notes, etc. I find these really helpful since I'm more of an audio learner than a video learner and do better with a lecture to watch.
Other courses are well fleshed out with PDFs and slideshows, which are still a great way to get information.
The problem is some courses have only one or two lectures out of the entire course available, or are missing key lectures.
I think that the OCW initiative is a great idea, and has been well implemented for some courses. I hope to see them get all of the courses up to par with the top quality ones.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Utah State University* also has open courseware as well as COSL (The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning), which is doing a lot to making the creation, remixing, and collaboration between open courses better. It also hosts the OpenEd conference.
*Disclaimer: I am a student at Utah State University
Wasn't MIT among the universities that started distributing [for a price] DRM'ed electronic books/lectures with a license [= ability to legally use] that would only last a semester or so?
It's really quite something to be able to peruse the MIT's material and all credit to them. However, I think that many find it difficult to go through such material if at the end of the study one has nothing but inner satisfaction and some knowledge to show for it. In the UK they have the Open University with online University Degrees and Post Graduate study courses in a very wide range of subject matters. See http://www3.open.ac.uk/about/ Now this is NO Free but is extremely cost effective compared to ANY other form of study and after study and exams results in a fully acredited Degree. Unfortunately it's available only to UK tax paying residents. The courses they offer for those outside of the UK are rather more expensive (no Government subsidy) and rather more limited in scope. There is nothing similar in the USA as far as I can see. Yes there are online degree courses but the cost basis is always rather high (certainly cmpared with the OU. I worked it out that a degree course would cost around Pds6,000.00 in the OU. Also entry is NOT dependent upon High School Certificate. You merely show up online, Register, pay and keep up with the course work etc. Unfortunately UK Citizens outside the UK (no tax residents are also excluded). It would be good if something similar to the UK's OU were available in the USA, entry wise and price wise. Meantime this is NOT a criticism of the MIT, I applaud their commitment to offering course material.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/index.php
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Why in the world do people use this shit? I'd love to see Gilbert Strang's lectures in linear algebra, but I'd love for my PC to continue functioning properly, too.
No doubt. OCW has been discussed many times here on Slashdot.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I would love to have MIT's course material available to study, but I know that if my feet aren't held to the fire, I tend to slack off. It would be cool for groups of people to get together to test one another as well on the material. Kind of Open Source Testing for lack of a better set of words. I also know that I get more self confidence and more of a sense of accomplishment when I do well on tests.
Real Player. Thanks a lot guys!
What?
Professor Strang's streaming lectures (and his book I checked out of the library) saved my ass and got me a B+ in that dreadful linear algebra class. What's great is I now love that subject.
As most of us know, knowledge is useless in the "real" world without the piece of paper behind it to back it up. Most employers don't want to do their own testing. I guess if you wanted to study your ass off and challenge a bunch of courses you could save that way.
It would be good if something similar to the UK's OU were available in the USA, entry wise and price wise.
Well there is always Canada's Open University http://www.athabascau.ca/ and it is not restricted to just tax paying residents of Canada.
The OU UK has launched a really great open learning site as well OpenLearn. Get to it though the OCW Consortium portal http://ocwconsortium.org/use/index.html or go to http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/.
That's most interesting input.
As most of us know, knowledge is useless in the "real" world without the piece of paper behind it to back it up.
If you need someone's permission or resources to apply knowledge then, sure, you might need paper credentials. The classic example is those looking to be hired for their first job.
But if you need knowledge and you're already in a position to apply it (e.g. self-employed, already employed with seniority, or a hobbyist/independent/artist/mad-scientist)... then this OpenCourse concept is fantastic. Kudos to MIT.
The self-employed and long-employed are, by the way, categories of the "real-world".
...and couldn't care less about copyright law, head over to a private e-learning torrent tracker (just Google...getting invites is harder, but persevere), or connect to the ed2k network. You can easily complement these MIT course outlines with the recommended textbooks, in nice .pdf, ready-to-print format. If you don't find what you need, request it and someone might be able to help you. Or just go to a library.
I appreciate MIT's initiative, but they should disclose a bit more about these courses than what amounts to, basically, extended syllabi. Lecture notes, from the samples I've examined, are predictably useless. Some of the courses have videos of lectures, and that's a big plus compared to most of what the OpenCourseWare program usually offers. But that's not really enough. It's somewhat useful, but they're only distributing breadcrumbs, pretending they're giving out the whole bread (or half a loaf).
So? It's good that this get posted again as a lot of people have not been reading /. since 2002. I've read about it before but I still like to be reminded that the resoureces are there to use.
As a physicist, I took a serious interest in the physics and math courses. A few are outstanding, providing lecture notes, worked examples, etc., but the majority have very little material. Frequently just a list of textbooks and a schedule - the sort of thing every college instructor posts for every course anyway.
Can you see the synergy? Projects like OLPC deliver computers into the hands of many intelegent young people with no real chance for education. Inovations like MIT Opencourseware provide University level information to them.
Of course, some will say, "Do we want millions of kids in third-world slums hacking linux??? To which I will say, "Yes, We Do."
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
As a Chinese, I would like to express my thankfulness to this project and to all staff of MIT.
Aren't points 1 & 2 obvious commercial endeavors?
Well, it seems the Open University is an actual entity in the UK, and get this, it's not even free! Anyhow, there's got to be another good name for the OCW-based collaborative, non-profit, collective course system.
It's not about getting university certificaiton.
Having the state of the art synthesized into class notes/presentations and available to all, is really valuable to working professionals. Want a primer on XYZ or LMNOP technology? Find the open courseware materials and study the relevant sections as an intro/primer. Really a great way to ramp up quickly on areas you are unfamiliar with in a short period of time, with informations distilled by specialists, instead of wading through conference papers, academic literature, or internet sources of dubious quality.
It also has a big advantage for MIT faculty: promoting their views of their specialities over others. Having your ideas more accessible increases your influence.
I think MIT is realising that there are a lot of people out there who want informal education. I have a post grad degree but did not go further (PhD etc) because I thought I could learn much more by pursuing my own goals rather than following a university program. I think this approach has worked well for me. Access to these courses will open up more opportunities.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you're doing this just for the paper-credibility then I think you're wasting your time.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
MIT's open courseware, in economics, is underwhelming. There is much more material available elsewhere and most professors have at least as extensive sites. I think this is mostly MIT grabbing publicity for content ordinarily available online.
Shoot, no video lectures. Shoot, no audio lectures. Well, maybe I can pick something up from those extensive lecture notes.
Oh. The lecture notes are like PowerPoint slides.
Oh. "Figure removed for copyright reasons."
OK, well at least it didn't take me more than 10 minutes to learn... that I ain't going to learn much bio-engineering from MIT's current "open" offering. Can we not run this story again until they actually have a fair chunk of content?
One of the courses had this comment in the online syllabus material:
"You should attend all the classes, no matter what. Nothing you could read will replace what goes on in class."
(link)
I am anarch of all I survey.
I have been collecting links to video lectures in my blog for a while now, not just MIT but tens of other universities as well. Check it out: Free Science Online Blog
For those poor ones who can't afford college, like myself, this is a great. In reality, knowledge of individual kept being challenged for purposes other then getting the fact. Without any official back up, in this case a college degree, even truth might suffer from losing to nothing, or worst, blindly believe in the winner's misinformation. Similar to the fact that I won't get my ABET even if I've self-studied all course in Mechanical Engineering, one won't gain much advantages towards challenge mentioned above. But the great thing is that knowledge from a trusted source will be able to strengthen ones confidence to stand against misinformations. In another word: You wont buy the sales's word who have convinced you to buy his miracle product which is whatever proven to make you healther or you are gonna die.
Absolutely agree the OU is worth doing. You don't need to be UK resident though (or a UK citizen). You do lose the subsidy - for a typical post-grad IT course this bumps the price from around 900 pounds to 1210 (though prices are going up). See for example http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01wM88 7#souk
It is quite amusing to note that I spent much time in the past hanging out at university libraries like UofP and MIT. Now, the open courseware represents yet another avenue of intellectual inquiry. But I will still hang out at the libraries, anyway, if for no other reason than to have an occasional chat with an intelligent babe. :-)
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
MIT belongs to this Consurtium, in the following link you can see a list of of institutions and organizations participating in OpenCourseWare Consortium: http://rvincoletto.multiply.com/journal/item/371
In addition to imposing self-discipline, a university class also puts you in touch with like-minded people who are also taking the class, so that classmates can benefit from each other's insight. There's a lot more motivation to learn when there is peer pressure just to be there physically in the classroom, if not actually contribute to the discussion --not to mention the non-peer pressure aspects such as actually learning from classmates' questions and the answers to them.
.net, not .gov (try that on for size, spam-harvester-bot!)
/.ers have done self-learning of languages to a useful level of proficiency.
If I had to name one particular component of university courses that distinguishes them from self-learning by sheer willpower and time spent at the library/bookstore, it would be: having a real-time setting where I see other class members ask questions and have them answered. Thus, those new-fangled "distance learning" university courses aren't "real" courses if it's just one-on-one chats with professors, even if it's a real-time video chat (or even personal one-on-one tutoring); I'd rather have IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and give up the video if it means I can interact with fellow classmates in a group setting.
Which naturally leads us to the next question: who's interested in getting together to attend one of these courses? Slashdot is a global geek community, and here is where we would probably find potential fellow classmates who want to form a group of two to six and go through some of the coursework together. But you can't exactly just post a story about "Ask Slashdot: So-and-so says, who wants to take the Linear Algebra course with me?" every time you find an interesting course. Would be nice if we had a forum where we could do exactly that.
Anyone have any suggestions? Any particular web site? Yahoo!(tm) groups --maybe a group called "OpenCourseWare"? MySpace web page? I haven't experimented with my Slashdot journal --can anyone post entries? If so, could I start a journal entry called "Who's Looking For Fellow OpenClassmates"? Meanwhile, just to have some starting point, I'll volunteer my email address for those interested:
"kwtm-zrewztid@tamlylin.gov" except replace the top level domain with
We've had at least two Slashdot stories about specific MIT OCW courses (not including this one, which I agree is non-news): an earlier one about a course on basic cryptography, and a more recent course about copyrights. Let's see if we can organize something.
Incidentally, I suspect self-learning of languages is more common than you make it seem. I crammed Spanish for the month before a little expedition to Latin America. If you count "computer languages" as languages, then I suspect the majority of
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Connexions (http://cnx.org) is a rapidly growing source of complete courses (including text), all under a creative commons license. Subjects range from electrical engineering, to modern music appreciation. There is a lot of material already. Please check it.
Is not anyone at least a little bit concerned about MIT offering that power out to everyone — including our enemies?
I'm not at all sure, they will be so overwhelmed with this generosity that they'll stop wanting to hurt us...
If you ever played "Civilization", the practical value of scientific advances should be immediately obvious. Real life examples abound too...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hearing all the time about how MIT supports things like this just makes me all the more pissed off about my interview for admissions. I'm one of the poor unfortunate souls who had to defend the merits of open source, Wikipedia, email, and pacifism to my interviewer who had problems with all these things. He also probably hadn't been on campus in at least a decade since he didn't know the correct size of the student body (he wasn't even in the ballpark). I passed a guy in the elevator with a bluetooth headset on on the way out of the building (a hospital, my interviewer is a surgeon) who complimented me on my GNU hoody, and I thought, "Now that's the image MIT's been portraying to me, not that... back there." So either MIT is actually lame and they put on a cool presentation, or (and I think this is the more likely option) I got really screwed by my misfortune to have this interviewer.
( I
I consider MIT OCW as a professor/teacher class instruction resource/content. I don't think the OCW project ever intended to replace academic book publishers or provide multimedia video sessions of a class day. OCW provides other professors/teachers around the world a new resource for course/class instruction/content development for conversion to other cultures, languages, and countries.
... are a few examples of MIT and the State of Massachusetts providing and producing leaders in science and technology that are actively responsible to US democracy, capitalism, society, and humanity.
...) and study. They could be wrong, but it -ain't- likely. This comment provides perspective on future modes of education using the many exceptional learning resources provided on the Internet, and in Avatar Populated Experience Simulations (APES) of future Learning Environments ....
... I have some (far past) experience with numerical coefficients, covariate analysis ... and I do know something about the Peloponnesian wars, A.N. Whitehead, Paolo Uccelo, William Aiken Walker, Maxfield Parrish .... My learning was not a failure, but education was lacking something. MIT and OCW folks THANKS, the future will be better, and learning is for some folks personal, but education will always be public or plutocratic. With public libraries, pubs, university book stores, and the Internet anyone can learn their own way, at their own pace, at any time any subject of interest. The future looks bright for many high school dropouts with curiosity and beer-pub discussions. Also, If you are a professor that would use the labels weird, fluke, pseudo-intellectual ..., then I would present that your subjective judgment is on you, not me or others.
... !HAVEFUN!
Institutions like MIT, CalTech, Stanford, and Berkeley have never appeared (or proved, as best I know) to be as egotistical as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have in the past. OCW, FSF, GPL, OKI, PKI
PLEASE NOTE: I am a high-school dropout, I do not have a college degree, I grew up in Alabama, I was in the USMC at 17yo. The comments above are what I know to be accurate and based on my knowledge, experience, and much personal reading (Whitehead, Frege, Hume, Sartre
Oh, I have taken a few college courses
DAMN, again I have traversed off topic
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
http://www.gameprogrammer.org/
I see what you mean about this particular postgrad course being available to those outside of the UK. Unfortunately all the research I have done, on their first degree courses, indicate they are 99% available ONLY to UK residents. Non residents do not even get the option of paying a higher Fee. If I am wrong PLEASE correct me.
You can see two nice textbooks at www.potto.org Fundamentals of Compressible Flow and Fundamentals of Die Casting Design
Motivation and discipline are different things. Self-discipline is to some extent a substitute for motivation. You do something because you have determined that you should through reason, not because you feel that you want to in the short term. However, you can't get anything done if you're completely lacking either.
Where to get self-discipline? That's something you learn growing up, and it's harder and harder to learn as you get older. It's mainly by example: from parents, from peers, and through personal experience.
As for motivation, I hear it's called Adderall. (More seriously, it's an emotional thing, and is built through encouragement and affection throughout life.)
When you start Scheme . . . you are interacting with a text-editing system called Edwin, which is a Scheme implementation of the Emacs text editor.
Now please excuse me while I don my asbestos suit . . .
This is a repost from a year ago. The MIT materials are useless. RTFA. There is no acutal information there; a typical "course" consists of a list and the words "buy and read this list of books".
Theres something about being immersed in a sea of people where the average IQ is 140 that is very stimulating (I'm a MIT grad). A few very disciplined people could do this all solo online, but its the multitude of learning channels that works for most MIT students. I'm not sure if its worth 50G a year. It ws relatively cheaper when I attended.
Yes, but it makes a huge difference which class you are looking at.
Sometime last summer I had one of their psychology classes up and it had audio (and I believe) video there for download.
Some classes are simply more multimedia than others.
I have taken classes at two schools through distance learning, one was a traditional school with a physical location and the other was purely online - both were accredited. Does anyone know of any good resources for locating other such courses? I have found some on Google, but they are SO focused on paid advertisements for you to watch, lots of clicking, and then most of the listings are paid sponsorships. Anyone?
While yes, college is much more helpful to goto then any OCW kind of class, the OCW really is a great resource. As in, I was accepted to MIT based on SAT scores but there is no way my family could afford ~$45,000/y so I went to Kansas State University instead (local college) and my entire time there was wasted. So in turn, you may not get the instructional professor assistance that you might get from going to a "university" but you have to take into effect the fact that most universities at undergraduate level can be more or less a waste of your time.
I now shall proceed to stop a rant about how universities have become more about the money then about the teaching.
you can check this for several textbooks www.potto.org
...had a great article on this back in September of 2003, interviewing people from all over the globe who were getting benefits out of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative:
? pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html
A nice read.
I gotta have more cowbell.
For those who might be interested, I recommend visiting:
http://ocwstudygroups.proboards83.com/
Take a walk around - feel free to suggest changes at this point. If you can host it yourself, feel free to take this skeleton and run with it.
- Avron
I always thought the draconian invite policies were to get people to behave themselves (share well, not harass people, be civil, and generally follow the rules). If the offender can just create a new account in 5 seconds, what is the incentive to behave? With an invite policy, he knows it's going to be a lot harder to get an account in the future. Maybe even impossible.
Regarding securing an invite, here's a little secret: most of these draconian invite sites have automatic "status" promotion for good sharing. When you get upgraded, you get access to special forums. Ask for invites in the appropriate thread in those forums, and people will take you much more seriously.
Just a note for information. The Open University has now joined in the Open Courseware Consortium using the name OpenLearn and started to make some of its course material available for free unde Creative Commons. It is not quite on the same model as MIT as the OU is releasing fairly short self-study units rather than whole course at a time. Anyway to see more of the learning materials go to:
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
There are also some interesting tools available for people who want to remix or work around the material. These are in a companion site at:
http://labspace.open.ac.uk/
(Admission - I do work for the OU.)
Thanks for the thoughtful input/update. Indeed some of those courses are of interest to me, so it's very useful. I did guess that you were an "insider", but appreciate your making it clear. I do not know whether my circumstances and needs are unique, or do indeed represent a larger potential source for online "students" with needs not yet fulfilled. What I do know is that my needs are not yet addressed (as far as I can yet see) by the MIT, or OU or even OpenLearn or other institutions of learning. Let me expand further. I was educated in the UK (9+ O'Levela, Additonal Math and 1 A level (Art)). I went into banking and had a 30+ year international career with appointments in Liverppol, London, Singapor, Bahrain. Geneva and New York. I am currently in semi-retirement in New Jersey, USA. I reached the EVP level of management, in a very large US Multinational Financial Services Company. The last 10 years I have been self employed, but now I have the appetite/desire to get a degree, for the pure challenge and learning experience. I do not need the usual "social college experience", hence online learning is very suitable to me and I have the time now. 30 years ago I sat for and passed 8 out of 10 exams for the Chartered Institute of Bankers (ACIB) qualification. I stopped short as my day (and night) job commitments conflicted with the time needed to finish. In the 1990s the CIB and UMIST offered to allow people like me (in mid stream of a qualification) to convert to a IFS Hons degree course (1986 onwards). I didn't attempt to take up on this opportunity, sadly, until last year, when I contacted them and asked if I could enter their course at some level. They, quite frnakly, came back and told me that since my courses for the ACIB were taken in the late 1960s I would "devalue their degree qualification" if they allowed me to rejoin. I was quite startled by this reproach. In their defence they knew nothing of my lifetime work achievements, but that's as far as I would EVER defend them! Their answer was very exclusive rather than suggesting ANY way fwd Thus I started looking around for other degree courses I could enter, online. There are many course, but most are exceedngly expensive (especially in the USA where degree courses are certainly anything but inexpensive). I loooked at the local alternative in a "County College", but these largely necessitate quite some distance in daily travel and actual physical attendance. i.e. not the route I wanted. The flexibility of an online set of courses being paramount to me. I then switched and looked at the well recommended OpenUniversity (OU) and fould it to be ideally suited to my circumstance. Except that non UK tax residents are closed out (except for Post Graduate courses/qualifications and a few courses in "online basket weaving" please excuse the humour). Ergo total frustration at their being no middle ground, for me to pay a lttle extra than the subsidised tax resident course fees. No other similar opportunity has yet to be found, in all my research. I must admit I even considered using a family UK address etc. and flying over for exams, but thought this was rather "inconsiderate" to the OU's stated policies as far as I understand them. Thus inspite of your kindly taking the time to respond, I am still left in a situation whereby I see some good learning opportunitues (such as OpenLearn) but no way to transform the education into a physical qualification, if indeed I am going to spend a few years and perhaps hundreds if not a thousand of hours of study, I like to know there is a piece of paper at the end of it. Call it motivation:) OK enough of my ramblings. My intent is to show that there MAY be a decently large group of potential students with needs not presently being met, for an institution such as the OU, consider future niche offering to...... i.e. a new Revenue stream without increasing your expenses excessively so that OU Fees + a reasonable premium charge might well make viable sense. Thanks again for having the consideration of replying to my comment.
Thanks for your reply. I would like to make two points in reply.
One is that the OU is looking into ways to be able to operate more globally and so more opportunities will open up.
The second is that open educational resources (e.g. OpenLearn, MIT and Connexions and more coming all the time) are only part of the story, with other parts being support and a qualification at the end. At the moment I think that people are working more on freeing resources but down the line I expect that someone will find ways to give credit for working through open content.
I agree that for many the qualification provides the motivation that is needed to do all the hard work needed to learn from degree level material.
I am glad to hear of the direction of OU. More power to you. I would make one point: For Baby Boomers, like myself, the time is now.... We BBs are approaching retirement/semi-retirment with immediate effect and probably we form the largest one time generation bulge with the time to indulge in an education some missed, or in a new direction. But we were a driven generation and need the motivation of a result at the end of an pursuits. (Hmm I am even now slipping into English spelling, my computer hates this!). I will follow OU and will likely try some of your OL courses for fun, but sadly you remain a mostly closed avenue for my main endeavour, for now.... Thanks for your evening time:)