Slashdot Mirror
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.
The most amazing thing is Gilbert Strang's linear algebra course. He is a genius lecturer
"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
More important, I think, than homework assignments is having the textbooks. And a large number of MIT's "open" courses lack the texts. It's rather useless if you're going there because you want to learn Subject X only to find that the only materials you have access to are some lecture videos and a few notes here and there. I understand that classes use books written by other people who have no intention of ever making that book free, but using MIT's OCW as a means of learning is far from a replacement for buying a book or going to a real course. Sometimes even a Wikipedia article provides more useful information about a given subject than all the materials about that subject offered for download by MIT combined. It might have changed since the last time I visited the site, but at the time it wasn't all that impressive except maybe as a refresher for stuff I already knew but hadn't used for ages.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
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.
...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).
Almost all MIT classes write new problem sets and exams each year. However, previous years' exams are some of the best resources for studying, and a large selection of these are usually provided as reference material.
Even university libraries often don't carry them, and when they do, they're often on reserve so you can't take them out, and have to stay in the library. (Or have a very short loan period of a couple hours or so.) At least from my experience.
However, for some topics, old editions can be great. For the calc book mentioned, the previous edition can be had from half.com for as little as $5; $15 supposedly new. For something like calc, this should work pretty well unless the assignments are saying "do this problem from the book". (Then again, if you're not actually taking the class, whether it matches its assignment is unimportant if you can figure out an appropriately relevant sample of questions.) For other topics, like some areas of computer science or bio, this isn't necessarily an ideal solution.
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