OCW is not an MIT education.
OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.
However, even with that disclaimer, I think it is a great opportunity for people to check out what a college class might be like and pick up whatever is offered. It would be a great opportunity for high school students to see what they might be getting into when and if they decide to go to college. It also looks like MIT OCW is adding items to YouTube, iTunes, and Flickr. In 2007, they reported over 2 million visits as a monthly traffic record. Their site statistics claim 75 million visits by 53 million visitors from virtually every country.
Another advantage would be for students to "test drive" other subjects that they think they might be interested in. This might allow them to narrow down what they might want to major in when they go to college. A lot of my friends ended up going to school longer than they planned because they ended up changing majors. Or they found a particular class just too challenging and decided to try something else to get around that class. (I think chemistry was one of those kind of classes.) These free courses might be valuable as refresher courses for people already with degrees.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
There are others but here are just a few more:
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's OPENCOURSEWARE (OCW) project provides access to content of the School's most popular courses. As challenges to the world's health escalate daily, the School feels a moral imperative to provide equal and open access to information and knowledge about the obstacles to the public's health and their potential solutions.
This web site offers links to other courses and reminds us that educators have been putting their material on the Web long before MIT was doing it.
I really like the design of the following site. It is one of my all time favorties. For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world.
One more and then I will quit.
This site gives some background and some good tips about free courseware.
I think it is great that there seems to be a lot of sharing going on. I think that is one of the most marvelous qualities about the Web; it has opened up so many opportunities for the World.
Thanks for visiting - Kathy
I shared a similar reaction when I discovered OCW sites. It was like stumbling into a vast state of the art library that you did not know existed while taking a stroll around the block. Free education? Wow! I ran into sites where you could watch videos of lectures. I like the Open Cousreware Consortium. http://www.ocwconsortium.org/home.html A site where over 200 education institutions and associated associations contribute content to the site.
ReplyDeleteKathy,
ReplyDeleteI came across the education portal.com which lists the Best Universities for deliverance of online Free courses. MIT is listed as are dozens of others. Wouldn't it be great to get paid to learn? Having access to hundreds of fantastic classes on every conceivable subject is like being a kid in a candy shop for me.
Diane