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Nov 01, 2002
MIT's OpenCourseWare: First Peaks and Future Paths
I still can't believe the M.I.T. has really decided to do something that is so brave, powerful, visionary, and great as to share all their course material online for public use without restrictions and completely for free. Wired has a background article on the project. For two months now, one can see the first courses online at the M.I.T. OpenCourseWare site. I have checked the Sloan School of Management section, and there is a full course "Introduction to Optimization" online. It comes complete with lecture notes, assignments, reading lists, etc. Perfect. Other courses are less complete, but it's only the beginning, so don't worry.
Within a few years, the M.I.T. wants to put more than 2,000 courses online, many of them even with video lectures or multimedia models. All courses will be managed by a full-fledged content management system, content will be in standard XML formats. There will be full search capabilities and support for interfaces into educational software.
Some criticize the project because they say it could never substitute for real-world universities. Of course not, and that is not the point. The point is that, there will now be scientific, structured, and most importantly education-enabled/-enriched knowledge online for the whole world to use for educational purposes of all kinds. I can imagine myself using it as secondary literature for my own university courses. I can see myself going back in 5 years when on a project at work to learn about one specific area. I can see schools and universities using the high-quality M.I.T. material to complement their own materials. I can see learning groups being established based on this material.
Or let's go futuristic: I can see people without access to, without money or without inclination for physical university education getting their education through this material. Just have someone put up tests afterwards, and you might have an international, standardized system for education amongst all scientific disciplines. Think TOEFL or GMAT. That might not be that futuristic after all, it might just be the natural direction this thing will take. And I can't wait for it to happen.
Posted by Stefan Smalla on Nov 01, 2002 at 22:58 | Permalink