| Education
is the most important resource that a person acquires over the years.
And education can come in many forms. But rarely is a formal education
completely free, especially an Ivy league education. However, that is exactly
what MIT has planned to do over the next 10 years. MIT has announced that
it plans to offer all its courses on-line for free. MIT president, Charles
M. Vest, announced last year that MIT would over the next 10 years put
all of its courses on-line for free at the cost of $100 million.
The project
will start with a two- year pilot program that will offer 500 courses on-line.
This means that students from all-over the world will have the opportunity
to sit-in on MIT classes. A precocious physics student from Chile and a
mathimatical genius from Russia will be able to follow a Electrodynamics
class at MIT together without paying the normal $26,000 fee that all MIT
students pay. The hitch to this program is that you can’t earn credit.
But the resources that will be available to the public will be enourmous.
The program will work as follows: all courses at MIT will have a web-site
and on that web-site you will have access to syllabuses, exams, simulation,
video lectures and problem sets. |
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President
Vest when asked to comment on the program said, “we see it as a source
material that will support education worldwide including innovations in
the price of teaching and learning itself.” This program, he suggested,
would be most useful for public Universities in the developing world that
are strapped for funds. By incorporating the expensive resources available
on-line at MIT with the classroom experience of a public University in,
say, Panama City, Panama or La Paz, Bolivia, the quality of teaching would
greatly improve in both Panama and Bolivia.
Most feel that
the program will prove that the web is truly a free sphere for learning.
A number of on-line course developers such as Cognitive Arts and Unext
Distance Education Company have expressed their approval for the program.
The consenus is that the program will greatly enhance the educational opportunities
for all who partcipate.
One possible
problem might be the willingness of professors to put their materials on-line.
Some might think that the work they do in their courses is theirs and therefore
might not want post it on-line. But since most professors have exisisting
web-sites, putting more material on-line should not be a real problem. |
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| A second problem
for professors will be students not showing up for class but rather watching
their classes on-line. Many professors at MIT have complained that students
skip their afternoon courses and then watch them at night when they want
over the internet.
For people
who wish to live outside the US and still want to keep up on what is going
on in the intellectual world of acdemia this will be a great way to continue
ones education and not go completely bust. Imagine sleeping and fishing
in the morning, writing in the afternoon and investigating what is happening
at MIT in the evening. For the offshore intellectual this program will
keep you current.
And what
has been the public reaction since MIT has made course material freely
available to the public: over 130,000 people have accessed the material
and use it regularly. |
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