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Ohio State Introduces Massive Open Online Calculus
An anonymous reader writes "Professors at the Ohio State University are embracing MOOCs, with a Massive Open Online Calculus Course — it is completely open source; everything is on github. There is are free videos, free online assessment system, and a free textbook!"
Is are a free English and grammar course too?
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
These online and free courses, do any of them apply to credits earned towards a degree or are they mostly an opportunity to learn something new or relearn (refresh) something you already should know?
I can see where just knowing a little more about certain subjects can enormously help people. Even when they should already know it but forget because they haven't used it for so long. For instance, I was trying to figure out how much sand I needed to cover a base for my patio and had to actually look up a formula instead of being able to remember what was needed to figure it out on my own (sand in my area is sold by the ton, not square or cubic foot). Another time, I was attempting to figure out how large of a square pipe (tube) I would need to match the flow of volume a round pipe on an exhaust stack would have and had to once again spend time looking up the formulas. I already had square tube on hand so I was looking at saving some cash.
I imagine that people use this type of information every day in their jobs and someone fresh out of school would probably be able to figure it out on their own in a few minutes. But for someone who is 17, would any of them apply to credits for college or just be a tool to give them a leg up for when they go?
I think the big deal is "open source". Any other person, school, tutor, or whatever can grab the source and adapt it to what they need. IF they improve it and release it, it can be improved on again and again. This might make it more useful then existing programs available.
While I enjoyed the proof techniques and the clean structure of the theory, I have had almost zero use for it in 20 years of IT research and consulting. Modern algebra or set theory would have been far more useful, but I had to each that to myself...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
WOW! Now in 1997 this is big news. Probably by 2013 or whatever there'll be hundreds of Calculus courses online and something like this won't be news at all.
Uh, it is news because AFAIK it is the first coursea MOOC (actually the first MOOC afaik) othat is making everything available with github. Every other MOOC I've seen delivers its content in a closed/semi-closed delivery platform. The closest thing I've seen are the MIT Open CourseWare materials made available via iTunes, but those are just content, not actual courses with live exams and grading.
But hey, don't let that stop people from nihilistically dismiss this good stuff. Whatever gets them through the day.
I'm all for Open Courses, especially when the Universities, Professors and Research are funded by the state (I'm not talking for US only). However, IMO the issue is, what should the priorities for self-learners be?
Math is considered as the language of science, but sometimes I wonder whether open courses on human relationships, empathy, self-help and helping each other (i.e. things that our parents taught us and are seldom, if ever touched upon by today's parents), and most importantly, detoxification from technology (I'm thinking of the billions of man-hours spent on texting, sexting and the so-called "social networking") might be more important for today's youth.
Except that most MOOCs moved away from open source and so this is news if a big university has decided to go back to the totally open source route.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
Herman Wouk wrote a short book called The Language God Talks. The title came from a statement made to him by Richard Feynman when Wouk was interviewing him for some background on the Manhattan Project for Wouk's two books on World War II. In their first meeting Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus and Wouk said no. Feynman told him that he should learn it since, "It is the language God talks."
I am an engineer and while I didn't actually USE much calculus on a daily basis, it did help me understand the relationships and equations that I did use every day.
The article summery says it is open source. Perhaps the author knows something about it or maybe they just assumed wrongly like you pointed out. If it is open source, I would say it is news worthy.
but does it count to credits?
Information about the actual course is located on https://www.coursera.org/course/calc1
Notable information is the class start date, August 23, and the result of taking the class, which is that you get a certificate signed by the instructor. The class is currently in progress (you're too late); the class lecture videos are much of the content are are on various instructor's YouTube channels.
What is checked into Github is the website and backend. There is no license that I can see for any content except (c) 2013, mooculus team, at the bottom of the site's non-doctype'd HTML. Math geeks can't nerd.
No, you really need calculus in computing today if you're going to get above the peon level. This is recent. I went through Stanford for a MSCS in 1985, and it was all discrite math - number theory, automata, mathematical logic. You didn't even need an FPU back then. That was sort of true until the mid-1990s or so. Then it changed.
Today, it's machine learning, machine vision, deep neural nets, Bayesian statistics, adaptive control... That's all number-crunching intensive. Today, advertising requires calculus. The algorithms behind Google, Facebook, and Amazon all involve heavy number-crunching. So does most of the "big data" stuff. Then there's quantitative finance.
There's an outsourcing firm in India which starts 23,000 people on a six month course in programming twice a year. That's the competition at the low end. You need to know a lot more than they do, and that does not mean knowing Javascript quirks.
The colophon of the book states it clearly enough:
"This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. If you distribute this work or a derivative, include the history of the document."
"The source code is available at: https://github.com/ASCTech/mooculus/tree/master/public/textbook"
I guess the rush to post overwhelmed any curiosity in the material itself. Yes, the repetition "or send a or send a" exists in the textbook.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I think the math articles are quite good on Wikipedia, often better than what used to be available in professional math encyclopedias that were still being sold through the 1990s. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a text book, it is expecting that you already have a high level of understanding and need reference material on the topic.
How is it that so many readers seem to be struck by an overwhelming duplication virus today?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun