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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."
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
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...
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.
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Having spent a few years at MIT doing a PhD, I agree with that. The most valuable things I got out of it (even though I didn't finish the degree) was able to live with the pressure of being surrounded by people much smarter than you. I spent pretty much all my waking hours working, playing, arguing with my peers in the lab. I was constantly exposed to new ways of thinking about problems, constantly lived in fear of not able to measure up. And then there are those dreaded oral exams. Ever since I was "tormented" by a half dozen professors in the oral portion of the general exam for PhD, I no longer feel any fear in engaging in technical discussions. That kind of experience must be gained by living in it, immersing yourself and trying to survive. This publicly available material is great for helping to spread the knowledge, but knowledge itself is only a component of education for a whole person.
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.
What it needs is accreditation and for colleges to accept its courses as transfer credit.
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I'm not so sure. It depends a lot on the lecture notes available and the instructor (if applicable). Now that my job has a tuition reimbursement program, I've gone back to school in Florida State's online B.S. in Software Engineering program. I'm only on my second semester now, but to be honest with you, the only reason I've cracked one of the obscenely overpriced textbooks in my C++ and Discrete Math courses is when graded "homework" was assigned out of them. My prof's lecture notes are almost like a textbook in themselves. (My Comp Org class is another story. The lecture notes are all in powerpoint, so that book actually gets read.)
If the lecture notes distributed in OCW are any good, they may be able to make up for the obscene text prices. If not, two words will help: "Previous Edition."
Local libraries often don't carry newer items such as textbooks.