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."

Comments

Other Free Courses/courseware?

[lecithin]

Here is a link for HP's free classes:

http://h30187.www3.hp.com/

Who has more?

Don't miss the best part: remixing

[chriss]

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!

Re:Don't miss the best part: remixing

[chriss]

So your point is that going to university forces you to learn the material and that is why it's better?

Somewhat simplified, but basically: yes.

Get some self discipline.

Great idea, why did I never think of that? Or why didn't billions of other people not simply get some self discipline? Not only would it solve all the problems of our educational systems, it would also rid us of smokers and obese people in no time. I'm actually in the educational business and the big problem is motivation, not access to information. Ever bought a language course on books and CDs? They are flying of the shelves, yet almost nobody (besides the people that already have hardcore self discipline) learns a language with these.

Should you actually have a solution how (or even where) someone can "Get some self discipline", patent it and get rich within seconds. A large part of human kind has been looking for a working solution for centuries. And as a hint: Just do it, Stop whining, Turn on your brain or You only have to really want to are no the solution.

Re:Don't miss the best part: remixing

[chriss]

It seems humans at a certain level are inherently lazy.

Don't think of is as lazy. Think of it as more economic in the short term.

Pleasure and avoiding unpleasant situations are major forces of motivation, and this actually makes sense evolutionary. Having sex not only is fun, but also prevents extinction, eating makes you feel good and prevents starving. Heating and air conditioning keep your environment in a temperature range not only comfortable, but also minimize the chance of freezing or endangering overstressing your heart. Watching TV gives more immediate pleasure than studying quantum physics. Small children usually act based on these economics.

But "learning quantum physics is more rewarding in the long run", so shouldn't you do it anyway? And one of the things that happens during socialization/growing up is learning to postpone pleasure. One nifty trick is to project your pleasure onto something else. A lot of people get kicks of doing a good jobs. If you play video games you are rewarded by points, which completely lack any positive physical feedback, but you have learned to feel good about them.

Now all this happens unconsciously. Someone who is very self disciplined has somehow found ways to gain his/her rewards in the process, so s/he can keep up motivation even through boring tasks. Unfortunately these peoples are often not aware that they are basically tricking themselves and so they flood everybody else with useless tips (the "just do it" kind), usually making it worse, because they cannot really explain what they do to stay motivated, make something difficult look very easy and thereby frustrate the other ones who fail because they believed the simplified version.

The problem is ways more complex and one of the big failures of our educational system is that it assumes that people act based mainly on logic, not that logic only works if it is synced with the basically hormonally run brain. To know is not necessarily to act. I have no short answer to how to change that and only an incomplete long answer. But a start is to forget about lazy and acknowledge that you choose anything for a reason, even if that reason is not what you would superficially consider logical. If you want your brain to do something, you have to offer it some reward now, not in two years. Lots of possible tricks, e.g. visualize your goal in the brightest colors for 20 minutes everyday before you start working. Might work for some people.

I believe that understanding how we learn and are motivated would lead to a leap in human evolution, but we are at the very beginnings. Add some decades for advancing neurology research here.

awesome.

[User 956]

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.

Real /. readers have been aware since 2002... ;-)

[Lord Satri]

"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.

And now...

[davecrusoe]

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...

Re:HP != MIT

[heroofhyr]

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.

I've used it regularly

[miyako]

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.

Berkley online classes/lectures

[lecithin]

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/index.php