Slashdot Mirror
MIT's Online Education Prototype Opens For Enrollment
OldHawk777 writes with news that MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online learning initiative, has opened free enrollment for its first course: 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics.
"Modeled after MIT’s 6.002 — an introductory course for undergraduate students in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — 6.002x will introduce engineering in the context of the lumped circuit abstraction, helping students make the transition from physics to the fields of electrical engineering and computer science. ... 'We are very excited to begin MITx with this prototype class,' says MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif. 'We will use this prototype course to optimize the tools we have built by soliciting and acting on feedback from learners.' To access the course, registered students will log in at mitx.mit.edu, where they will find a course schedule, an e-textbook for the course, and a discussion board. Each week, students will watch video lectures and demonstrations, work with practice exercises, complete homework assignments, and participate in an online interactive lab specifically designed to replicate its real-world counterpart. Students will also take exams and be able to check their grades as they progress in the course. Overall, students can expect to spend approximately 10 hours each week on the course."
Hooray for free online education! *goes to OCW to refresh prereqs*
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
For a FREE education from MIT, go to prep.ai.mit.edu.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
... still do a keg stand at home?
Does stealing my neighbor's dog count for stealing the rival mascot?
wow really interesting, i'm gonna check it out.
Guess it's time to see if I can hang...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
this is really an excellent idea and i want to thank the good folks at MIT for their effort. Should be great to see how this pans out. I think this will beat the numbers put up by the prof at berkeley.
I have been enjoying the Stanford CompSci stuff. It lacks polish but it is great. I love the teaching company stuff as well. Online lectures are still all a bit of a dogs breakfast but they can only get better and better. But at some point I could see the free online product being better than that offered by most Podunk universities. There will always be gaps such as doing a chemistry lab but at some point soon online free will be better than the worst North American institutions.
I have four questions:
These online courses in many cases are certainly better lectures than those given by 99% of local lecturers so when will local courses use this resource?
When will you be able to get a usable certificate from these places?
And when will employers begin recognizing them?
And what happens to the whole going to University experience if you sit in front of a computer for 4 years? This last leads me to believe that the most likely outcome will be a blending of bricks, mortar, and internet.
And a side point. This doesn't just apply to University. The Teaching company has HS level courses that blow anything I took completely out of the water.
Education should be free. and also medicine.
Just the other day I got stuck on a particularly woolly Project Euler problem and cruised on by http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ to finally learn 6.042/18.062. I was actually prepared to learn a whole course worth of material, was psyched I'd found the motivation, only to have cold water poured on me when I discovered that the problem set solutions aren't posted. Looked around at other courses and found that this is not uncommon.
What's the point of this MITx with only one course? Why don't they get serious with what they started with OpenCourseWare first? I'd like to see them go all-in for most of course 6, 8, and 18.
It's funny you chose that title, as Huxley would very much disapprove of what is going on here. Thousands of students planted in front of machines getting the knowledge they need placed inside of them... which is admittedly an exaggeration for effect, but one that I believe in.
I took Thurn and Norvig's into to AI class and was pretty thoroughly disappointed. But I am also disappointed in most of what went on in my undergraduate school, and equally disappointed with myself when I was yapping in front of calculus students at the UC when I was lecturing there. The problem is that lecturing is really crappy for actually learning anything. However, it's the easiest thing to do, and scales remarkably well. Furthermore, adult learners love it. Especially those who have already learned something about the subject. The process usually goes: student learns something marginally well, hears a concise explanation/lecture on the subject later, things connect and click into place, and then the learner says "well why the hell didn't they just do that in the first place?!?". The answer is that it wouldn't have worked in the first place. It works now because of the scaffolding afforded by your earlier education (re your HS courses being blown out of the water).
It was best said at a paper presentation I went to recently that "we need to get out of this mode of believing that if we can just find someone to explain things better than anyone else then we can record it, package it, and solve all of our educational problems." Students need to do, experience, build knowledge and skills. Sure, lecture can be a part of it, but I think most people find that exercises, study groups (especially the more collaborative ones), labs and other more constructivistic experiences are what made the content from lectures stick. So the answer isn't in the content, but rather the glue that does the blending you speak of above.
If you can use pre-recorded lectures, you can spend the class time as tutorials in the British sense - the experts guiding the students through their difficulties.
"You must know basic calculus and linear algebra and have some background in differential equations." Stupid math... someone point me to a refresher....
6.002x is an MIT subject. VI is an MIT course.
Will be interesting to see how this affects admissions...as High Schoolers will likely be trying to take courses in advance of their application to MIT (or other schools for that matter) and will then reference these courses and the grades they received in their application.
Hey, maybe it's a better admission criterium than GPA or SAT?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
This is starting slow - but, these online courses will be the next "big" thing - simply because they are so much more affordable than traditional college courses! The question is -- how does a college verify the person taking the tests?? Will be fun to watch this develop!
It's funny you chose that title, as Huxley would very much disapprove of what is going on here.
Meh - Huxley stole the line from Shakespeare... I'm not quite so sure that he'd have disapproved. ;-)
I took Thurn and Norvig's into to AI class and was pretty thoroughly disappointed. But I am also disappointed in most of what went on in my undergraduate school, and equally disappointed with myself when I was yapping in front of calculus students at the UC when I was lecturing there. The problem is that lecturing is really crappy for actually learning anything. However, it's the easiest thing to do, and scales remarkably well. Furthermore, adult learners love it. Especially those who have already learned something about the subject. The process usually goes: student learns something marginally well, hears a concise explanation/lecture on the subject later, things connect and click into place, and then the learner says "well why the hell didn't they just do that in the first place?!?". The answer is that it wouldn't have worked in the first place. It works now because of the scaffolding afforded by your earlier education (re your HS courses being blown out of the water).
I can't agree with that. I've done a heck of a lot of time as an undergrad, through various media.
I studied computing full time at one of Scotland's top unis. I studied two-and-a-half language degrees with the Open University of the UK -- one of the oldest and best-respected distance learning establishments in existence. I'm now doing mixed-mode study with one of Scotland's newest universities, the UHI.
I've studied by lecture, by book, by TV documentary, and by online text.
The best stuff I ever studied was book-and-TV, but that doesn't really count, because that was an English language course, and so the course designers really knew about how to connect with an audience. In general, I find lectures are better than books, and books are better than online. The reason for this is the density of the text. If you transcribed a good lecture, it would look really messy, and more than a little patronising, because a good lecturer talks around a subject to give you a feel for what's going on before sticking a name or a formula on it. He'll ask lots of rhetorical questions to start your brain contemplating the issues. He'll make passing reference to related concepts that you've previously encountered that are related to the topic under discussion. And you won't even realise that he's done it. What you remember after a good lecture is the target knowledge, not the teaching method.
But when the lecturer sits down to write a book, he focuses on the target knowledge -- there is very little done to prepare your mind for the new knowledge. This isn't just laziness, it's the nature of the medium -- you read faster than he lectures. The pauses, the gaps, the little bits of thinking time -- you can't put them down on paper.
Shift to online learning, and the target-knowledge focus is even tighter. Effectively you get a series of condensed lecture notes, but without the lecture before. Lecture notes only serve to remind you of what was said, not to say it to you. So the online courses are very difficult to learn from, and most of the "elearning" I've taken both in education and in the workplace is simply rote memorisation of a bunch of definitions, often being tested with "Goldilocks" type questions -- three answers: one "too hot", one "too cold", one "just right". Even if they don't use Goldilocks questions, your improvement is measured by answering the same questions again, which means that you don't have to learn why you were wrong, just that you were wrong and to give the correct answer next time.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
How many students in the UK do any prep for tutorials? I seem to recall doing most of mine on the bus to uni or sitting in the hall between lectures. One of the unsung benefits of the lecture is the dedicated timetable. You can't put it off till later, and you give it (almost) your full attention (when you're not writing stuff on the desks).
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Important distinction: It differs from Huxley's scary envisioning because those (viewing? using? taking?) the material have chosen to. Were they to become homogenizing, brainwashing, lowest-common-denominator, they'd choose something else.
If I get a certificate with the Logo MIT on it, I am in!
Are you kidding me? I hated re-learning what I already knew in lectures. The only ones I enjoyed were where there was actual new stuff.. which was usually in the second half of a semester, when I'd already stopped attending the lectures and instead just read the online lecture notes.
I've learned way more just reading books, magazines and web pages than I ever did at University.
All these free online courses recently have been first year material, ie very broad and not very deep at all. You'd be better off just finding the textbook in a library and spend an afternoon reading the chapters you're interested in.
which is totally what she said
It'd be interesting to see if a real degree could be acquired using nothing but the free courses being offered at various universities. So long as they all take each others credits it shouldn't be an issue.
Maybe not a FREE masters or doctorate, but, possibly, a significantly reduced cost. You'd only need to grab some humanities to "round out" your education.
I would love that! :)
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
In order to succeed in this course, you must have taken an AP level physics course in electricity and magnetism. You must know basic calculus and linear algebra and have some background in differential equations. Since more advanced mathematics will not show up until the second half of the course, the first half of the course will include an optional remedial differential equations component for those who need it.
For example, I don't even see latin mentioned in any of these...
http://hms.harvard.edu/admissions/default.asp?page=requirements
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcal/documents/TSS_NEJM_reading
http://www.hhmi.org/grants/pdf/08-209_AAMC-HHMI_report.pdf
You might impress a stogy old prof on an admissions committee with a latin class on your course transcript, but I doubt it will help you get a jump start on your medical degree more than learning conversational skills in a non-dead foreign language in preparation for patient care in our now increasingly multicultural society.
Apologies to Dr Sheldon Cooper of course, advanced biology courses are probably a better investment of time if one is aiming towards a jump start on a medical degree ;^) Physics, although important, hasn't changed much in it's application to medicine (other than perhaps radiology), but being on top of genetics and cell biology is becoming increasingly important. Getting the basics down early allow time to learn all the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.
Many universities like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale ... have over the past decade been developing and researching fresh learning architectures related to evolving demographics of present, future, global, and lifetime learners. The brick and mortar, and legacy rote-pedagogy centric models are limited by culture-bias, geography, and economics.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?