On Fri, 5 Jan 2007, Karen Watters Cole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted: > By the end of 2007, all courses taught at MIT will be available > online, to anyone, from anywhere: No registration, Free.
> “The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of > Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities > worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of > elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire > to learn. Intended as an act of "intellectual philanthropy," > OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course materials such as > syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, > illustrations, and so on. So far, by giving away their content, the > universities aren't discouraging students from enrolling as students. > Instead, the online materials appear to be only whetting appetites for > more. "We believe strongly that education can be best advanced when > knowledge is shared openly and freely," says Anne Margulies, executive > director of the OCW program at MIT. "MIT is using the power of the > Internet to give away all of the educational materials created here." > > The MIT site (ocw.mit.edu), along with companion sites that translate > the material into other languages, now average about 1.4 million > visits per month from learners "in every single country on the > planet," Ms. Margulies says. This is truly impressive stuff. This is the first I've seen of material with actual meat to it offered online. I've just spent a few hours wandering about, and there is enough real content there for a person to acquire a graduate level education in real worthwhile subjects like topology and general relativity, rather than the usual vacuous nonsense that typically comprise online education sites. Also a great resource of practical auxiliary stuff as well, as one might expect from MIT. If you need to pick up a graduate engineering level of understanding to compute a few numbers to see whether your new widget will collapse under the stress of vacuum or whatever, it's all there for the absorbing. > What OCW is not, its supporters agree, is > a substitute for attending a university. For one thing, OCW learners > aren't able to receive feedback from a professor - or to discuss the > course with fellow students. Not entirely true: the site provides discussion fora for all the courses offered. You can post questions and respond to others. The only limitation is how many other home wizards happen to be chewing through "Relativistic Quantum Field Theory II" at the same time you are. With a possible participant pool of only the internet-connected subset of the population of one small planet, this may be a problem. "Introduction to Topology" has some recent activity, but "QM Field Theory II" is as yet unoccupied. -Pete V A college education is "really the total > package of students interacting with other students, forming networks, > interacting with faculty, and that whole environment of being > associated with the school," says James Yager, a senior associate dean > at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University > in Baltimore. He oversees the OCW program there. His school of public > health now offers nearly 40 of its most popular courses for free via > OCW. The school's goal is to put 90 to 100 of its 200 or so core > courses online within the next year or so. In November, learners from > places such as Taiwan, Britain, Australia, Singapore, Germany, Japan, > and the Netherlands logged some 80,000 page views of OCW course > material, Dr. Yager says. Besides MIT, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins, the > OCW consortium (ocwconsortium.org) in the United States includes > among its members Michigan State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Utah > State. Internationally, members include groups of universities in > China, Japan, and Spain. http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070104/ts_csm/cmit <http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070104/ts_csm/cmit> _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
