MIT To Make Nearly All
Course Materials Available
Free On The World Wide Web
by Matthew Atlee
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| 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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Charles M. Vest, President,
MIT
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| MIT and the OpenCourseWare team
are excited to share with you a first sampling of course materials from
MIT's Faculty. We invite educators around the world to draw upon the materials
for their own curricula, and we encourage all learners to use the materials
for self-study. |
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L I C K H E R E ~
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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. |
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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. 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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More
Resources ~ More Resources ~ More Resources
  MIT
OpenCourseWare | Home Page - MIT
OpenCourseWare Pilot Site -
Unexploited
Resources of Online Education for Democracy - Why the Future Should Belong
to OpenCourseWare - View
Online - With Massachusetts Institute of Technology's bold OpenCourseWare
Initiative, one of the world's leading universities is making its teaching
material accessible on the Internet, free of charge, to any user anywhere
in the world. While this seems counterintuitive in the trend toward commercialization
in today's educational markets, we argue that this strategy could not only
prove successful economically, but also exploit human capital resources
that would foster innovation and strengthen the democratic foundation of
a knowledge-based society.
MIT
News - http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw.html
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Also See:
Studying
Abroad - Getting Your Education Overseas - Teaching Overseas -
EscapeArtist.com
Overseas Education & Teaching Resources - |
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