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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!
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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.
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
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...
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.
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"
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.
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.
...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).
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.
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.
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
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]
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?
You can see two nice textbooks at www.potto.org Fundamentals of Compressible Flow and Fundamentals of Die Casting Design