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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."
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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.
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...
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.
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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"
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/index.php
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
That would rock, all right... it'd be great to see a popular community site for self-study participants. It'd be more like a natural extension of the OSS developer-support process. Instead of explaining how to use API function X or feature Y, you'd see people answering questions about lecture points and even swapping exams for grading. (The idea of being accountable to someone else, even an anonymous study partner 2,000 miles away, would be a great motivator for many people.)
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
...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).
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."
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.