Posted 7:41 AM by Blah blah

MIT OpenCourseWare, the most exciting invention since Coke bottle glasses:

(If you get tired of talking to teenagers on Rice Bowl Journals, check out Metafilter, which has a much wider audience and more intelligent discussions.) From Metafilter, some stunning news!

In one week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will start to offer its course materials on the Internet. TOTALLY FREE! You heard me. It's a project called MIT OpenCourseWare, a way to help make education free and more easy for everyone. Beginning Sept. 30, it will offer sample courses from the following departments:

Anthropology
Biology
Chemical Engineering
Chemistry
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Economics
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
History
Linguistics and Philosophy
Management
Mathematics
Mechanical Engineering
Ocean Engineering
Political Science
Urban Studies and Planning

From the MIT press release:

"The website for MIT OCW will include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments for virtually all MIT courses across the Institute's entire curriculum -- in architecture and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social sciences, management, and science....

[It has an] initial goal of making over 500 courses available on the World Wide Web over the next 2 1/4 years. MIT OCW is fundamentally an information dissemination initiative. The university will not give either college credit or degrees through MIT OCW."

From the BBC News:

"Over the next 10 years, MIT will move all its existing coursework on to the internet.

There will be no online degrees for sale, however. Instead, it will offer thousands of pages of information, available to anyone around the globe at no cost, as well as hours and hours of streaming video lectures, seminars and experiments.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. MIT wants to start nothing short of a global revolution in education.

'Our hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide,' said MIT's Professor Dick Yue....

Staff have spent months clearing up complex copyright issues and designing software tools that will enable hundreds of faculty members to upload their daily lecture notes and video clips directly onto the website."

I am rubbing my hands in glee! At the Berkeley engineering school, we had only a limited amount of courses that they videotaped. I checked out some Solid-State Devices lectures when I took it in electrical engineering. But it was very limited. This OCW truly exploits the potential of the Web as a great leveller of income, class, and geography! Yeah baby!

Also, I wrote this last year about ArsDigita University, another stunning innovation:

Check out ArsDigita University, a curious school that crams the equivalent of the last TWO YEARS of a BS in computer science into ONE YEAR. Started by ex-MIT professor Philip Greenspun, ArsDigita is for especially bright people who already have a BS degree, are typically changing their careers, and who can survive the rigorous selection process. The 2000 academic year accepted only 36 students. Students are taught by mostly MIT PhDs and have an enviable student/faculty ratio---one full-time teacher and ten part-timers, about 3:1. They take one course per MONTH and finish eleven courses in the year. No GE requirements or other bullshit. They need to study 6 days/week and 12 hours/day. What is most revolutionary is that ArsDigita tries to put its entire curriculum (lectures, problem sets, solutions, labs) on the Net! And tuition is free. Period. Greenspun actually founded and runs the ArsDigita Corp., which develops open-source e-business software and solutions.

Mindboggling. Now there is no excuse for anyone not to be able to study computer science! For some bright poor kid in the slums of Pakistan, this online curriculum could be his meal ticket out of poverty and violence.

[Update: I spoke too soon! ArsDigita Corp. is in trouble. Recently, Philip Greenspun was forced out of his company by his own VCs and managers. Not only that---the CEO and VCs are suing Greenspun and the two other founders. I have not read the tale, but it looks like a tragic story of a startup imploding. Hold on to your resumes!]