Posted on 01/15/2007 3:52:44 AM PST by bad company
By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.
The cost? It's all free of charge.
The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
UC Berkeley
A neat idea, but what can I get from MIT courses that I can't get at the local library?
You can do this sitting in your jammies....... oops sorry. Forgot who I was talking to. ;-)
You can play on the MIT Online Basketball Team. ;->
Seriously, this is a boon to homeschoolers. You don't have to search for the stuff elevant to your subject.
Local libraries have scant technical resources.
Actually, I've perused some of their courseware. Basically, it's just lecture notes, no big thing. You have to buy the text book with your own dough. Some of the lecture notes are mostly just hand drawn vugraphs. You do get problem sets, some solutions.
You cannot contact the faculty; you don't get a beaver ring, or a grade or a transcript.
I have found some excellent courseware on the Web, MIT's didn't really impress me.
Hey, thanks for the link.
Looks like this could be a cool site.
I imagine this will be a tremendous benefit to progress, but a huge blow to modern leftism.
Thanks for that link. I've been looking for something like that, Now I have it bookmarked.
Thanks for the link, bookmarked.
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It's been years since I saw "The Paper Chase", but IIRC, the students at Harvard break into the library and steal the class notes (from long ago) of the great Professor Kingsfield. Having these notes, they are sure, will reveal to them the deep secrets of Contract Law.
Of course, when they look at them, they learn that his notes are a lot like anybody's notes. The secret to the knowledge isn't in the notes -- it's in the minds of the people who think deeply on the subject.
That being said, I think MIT is doing a good thing here. It's not the Holy Grail, but it still has value.
...
Exactly. Lecture notes don't tell the whole story. That's what the professor is supposed to do--fill in the information between the lines.
Great. So now I can cut classes remotely...
The old saying applies: You get what you pay for!
Ping to you
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