[EAS]MIT's OCW Goes Online

[pjk]

Subject:   MIT's OCW Goes Online

Dear Colleagues -

If in response to past EAS-INFO mailings you hesitated over the Delete
key in the right instances, you will be aware of MIT's brave, and at a
time of intellectual property greed, paradigm-breaking, $20m
OpenCourseWare project of putting their courses online for free. E.g.
see <http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00936.html>.

Few courses in Engineering are as yet online. But those of my
colleagues involved in the ABET accreditation process should note the
software engineering lab course
<http://ocw.mit.edu/6/6.170/f01/index.html> whose syllabus has the
full ABET-required Objectives and Outcomes statements. Other
Engineering courses do not (yet?) have such sections. We're all
learning the new ways.

   --PJK

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(from  Edupage, October 04, 2002)

INITIAL MIT COURSEWORK GOES ONLINE
This week MIT began placing courseware online as part of its
OpenCourseWare project (http://ocw.mit.edu/). MIT opted not to develop
a for-profit learning initiative, as some other colleges and
universities have, choosing instead to make its courseware open to the
public online. MIT plans to put lecture notes, assignments, syllabi,
tutorials, video simulations, and reading lists from over 2,000
courses on the site over the next ten years, though no credit will be
offered for those who complete the assignments. Questions remain about
technology tools for the site and intellectual property issues, but a
representative of the program said that so far the response has been
overwhelmingly positive. Critics said the offerings so far are limited
and that merely posting such resources online does not substitute for
an education at MIT. Officials from OpenCourseWare agreed that the
experience of learning at MIT is not replicated by the program, but
they hope that it will serve as a model for other institutions to
disseminate their own resources.
Wired News, 4 October 2002
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,55507,00.html