I was not screwing around. When I took the first physics class of my life, at age 35, it was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and my professor was Walter Lewin, one of that institution's most respected instructors. Lewin is a man so comfortable with his vectors that he diagrams them in front of a classroom audience while wearing Teva sandals.
OK, I wasn't really "at" MIT. And "took" the class may be a stretch. I was watching the video of one of Lewin's lectures from the comfort of my backyard in Brooklyn, and I too was wearing sandals (but not Tevas; I have standards).
Lewin is the breakout star of MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, what the school calls a "Web publication" of virtually every class taught in its hallowed halls. For his dynamic teaching and frequent stunts (building a human pendulum, firing golf balls at glass panels), he's been downloaded by physics enthusiasts around the globe and profiled on the front page of the New York Times as the first luminary of online open learning. The professor's fans are examples of a new type of student participating in a new kind of education, one built around the vast library of free online courseware offered by many of the world's temples of higher learning, as well as museums, nonprofit organizations and other knowledgeable benevolents.
Why would someone who's not paying $38,000 or getting a single credit subject themselves to the rigors of an MIT course? For one thing, OCW offers elite teaching on demand. College students at lesser schools can use a teacher like Lewin to stretch themselves (32 percent of MIT's OCW users are enrolled at another college). A high-school physics teacher might tune in to brush up on the laws of thermodynamics -- or become a better teacher by studying different methods of instruction. An engineer can beef up by taking tests from the advanced-level classes to identify stuff he ought to know but doesn't and then dive into course notes to learn them.
And then there's the just plain curious, a category that would include me. I wondered: What's an MIT course like, anyway? Could I, more than a decade out of school, hang with those young brainiacs? To find out, I dusted off my three-ring binder and re-enrolled in school part-time from the comfort of my couch, drawing not just from MIT but from the many free sources online. Mimicking a typical course load, I would take a science course and a language course, attempt to cram in a computer-programming course, and watch as many miscellaneous lectures as I could stand. I wanted to see if I, in a month, operating as an adult balancing a semi-regular schedule and lots of other obligations, could actually learn something.
The idea behind MIT's OpenCourseWare program was born in 2000 on the recommendation of a faculty committee convened to answer two questions: How is the Internet going to change education? And what is MIT going to do about it?
Steve Carson, a spokesman for OCW, which is now a full entity within MIT with a $3.6-million budget, told me that the group was expected to recommend a for-profit distance-learning program. Once they started thinking hard about such a model, however, it didn't make sense.
The problem is that MIT is, by its very nature, an exclusive institution, which accepts a mere 12 percent of its applicants and charges a small fortune for the privilege of attending. To put a scaled-back version of that online, available to a much larger audience, and still award credit would potentially devalue the existing university. Instead, they decided to do the opposite: put everything out there for free, but with no offer of credit or a degree. It would cost a lot of money, sure, but it would be great for the school's image, and it would be a tremendous resource for actual MIT students -- as Carson puts it, a "souped-up Wikipedia" for the MIT community to use. In the meantime, it would give the whole world the opportunity to sample an MIT education. Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of Japanese and linguistics at MIT, was one of the key members of that committee. He speaks of the program with uncut idealism. "Why are we doing this?" he says. "We're doing this because of the belief that knowledge, when you share it, expands."
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As a quotee in this piece, I'd like to share information about Peer2PeerUniversity.org . For this peer run free university (no formal accredidation, like open courseware), we created a course in Arid Land Restoration. This is our first year, so please check us out! P2PU.org
P2PU COURSES
Behavioral Economics and Decision Making
Copyright for Educators
Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature
Land Restoration and Afforestation
Neuroethics and International Biolaw
Open Creative Nonfiction Writing
Poker and strategic thinking
I love MIT on youtube, I watch it all the time. My favorite is Aircraft Systems Engineering which is all about the development of the space shuttle with lectures by many of the people who developed it. Oh and you can ask questions, the youtube community that watches these video's often respond to your queries.
holy crap i'm going back to school. well not school but home computer screen school!
this is a good thing, distribute fine education on a massive scale and you end up accelerating progress.
this is exactly what the world needs right now.
no i'm not being sarcastic.
So why can't a real university establish a program based on MIT's lectures quiz's and exams but without suffering the enormous cost in buildings and salaries. Graduate student assistance and labs following the course content could be provided at a minimal cost.
Graduates could write state or federal level professional exams for PE type standing. A competition could be held to compare the skill of real MIT grads to off campus graduates.
An excellent way to give poor and 2nd 3rd world students an education and recognition they could only dream of. Seems like a huge waste to have every school in the world duplicating the efforts of the best and brightest at MIT.
I definitely saw this same information on the NYTimes blog, but I don't think that online learning should replace classroom interaction. I think that it should facilitate the learning experience and replace tutoring. I believe sites like Thinkwell and MindBites are the future of tutoring and will replace test preparation schools like Kaplan and Sylavan Learning and The Princeton Review. MindBites offers individual lessons on specific subjects for a small fee of $0.99 while The Princeton Review makes you pay for a full course overview. Judge for yourself: mindbites.com/category/5-education
Education expenses is really depressing. Especially today, I am experiencing hardship to send my children to school because our income fluctuated badly. I used to have cash advance to sustain the daily needs of my family. At the same time working so hard.
here is the link to apply online: http://personalmoneystore.com/Cash-Advance/
i hate school. why couldnt they think of something else
from Poultney, VT
What! No Football!
from Winnipeg, Manitoba
I Google Everything. Anything you could possibly want to know has been exploited on the internet one way or another.
Not just intellectual information but even the all the pointless stuff. Anything else you can theorize and then get all the similar variable's of truth on the internet to support your logic.
Learning by yourself allows you to do things your own way that may not have been done before, possibly resulting in a more efficient way of learning. Being self taught is a great way to learn. Learning how to do things whether its hands on skill, or observing another beings technique.
I want to learn as much about nature as possible. So I pragmatically theorize about the most common anomaly's to life. Example : Existence of All Matter existing Within the Gamma Gradient radiated energy, including the X-ray and Ultra Violet spectrum's. To find some answers I will Google others thoughts on the subject, by searching for the subject itself.
Learning new words and new definitions I gain Understanding and then I express my understanding and debate in order to get an answer or somewhere closer.
The Internet has been the most important technological advantage to mankind since the telephone. Both, being communication tools. Human Communication is Very Important, because the more we can Teach Each Other, the Faster we all get there.
Take what is Available, Give What is Not.
The information of the world's most brilliant minds is within a search engine. So Take It. If you haven't seen a concept your interested in, Post is Somewhere and you will get feedback.
www.darkfx.cjb.net
As a senior at MIT, I am not surprised that he struggled with 8.01 for several reasons.
1. It is a hard class. Many of the actual students were confused too. I know I struggled with the math.
2. No recitations! 8.01 has two or three hour long recitations a week with a professor. You work problems and ask questions. With ocw, you only get half of the instruction.
3. No textbook. The 8.01 textbook is well written, and useful. I spent many hours re-reading sections.
4. What about problem sets? They should be online as well, with solutions, but you didn't mention doing them. You actually understand the material by working problems. You would have to be some sort of mega-genius to lean without them.
5. Other students. On my hall, there is a pset party every night where the freshmen work on the 8.01/8.02 problem set together. I know I wouldn't have survived without friends who had a better understanding of the math.
Anyway, that's my two cents. Don't feel bad for "droping" the class :)
the teachers in the actual campuses MAKE SURE you know the info so they can get that piece of paper called a diploma and with computers there are methods of "cheating" if you will...so they dont give you diplomas by e-mail, insecure. As easy as that
from neverland
If you live in very remote area and if you can understand english, you can learn quite a lot. Specially if you combine video lectures with torrents and other P2P technologies. But the applicability of knowledge remains mostly in the hands of politics. We need video lectures for leaders.