At First Glance--And Later On

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > At First Glance--And Later On

Current News

At First Glance--And Later On

11/17/2004

By Terry Calhoun

One of the best things in cyberspace is expanding, and that's a good thing. MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative (OCW) has been around now for a while. I first visited OCW only about a week after the first one or two courses were available. They were pretty high-powered courses without much useful content on line and I left a bit disgruntled, thinking that there was not much there a person could work with, especially without direct access to the pertinent faculty. It's a different site now, with nearly 1,000 courses available. You should go there and maybe poke around for some interesting courses.

As I did so recently, a strong memory came back to me from when I visited a number of top graduate schools in anthropology in 1973, trying to decide which of many offers I would accept. At each school I registered for a day's worth of official visits, but then I arrived early and unofficially sat in the back of classes and watched faculty and students interact. At one such school, in the south, during my "stealth day" visit, one of the lead faculty members stood at a podium and droned on from class notes that were on yellowed paper and crackled as he turned the pages. Although I went through the official visits the next day, the image of those dry, dusty, old lecture notes kept that school from my serious consideration.

Here's what OCW tells the world it is and isn't. It:

Is a publication of MIT course materials
D'es not require any registration
Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
D'es not provide access to MIT faculty

Please check out the MIT OpenCourseWare Web site yourself. There are more than 100 courses in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science section. I am sure that you can find one or two to get "lost" in and learning something.

There are lots of courses there, with incredible depth--entire streaming videos of lectures and labs, and so forth. But I am going to dig a little deeper into a single, simpler course: MAS.110: Fundamentals of Computational Media Design, Spring 2003, that is not one of the most extensively documented, just to show that even one of the least-documented courses offers good value.

MAS 110: After clicking on "Media Arts and Sciences" we see a listing of available courses, most of which are graduate level. MAS 110 is an undergraduate course.

When you arrive at the course, a shaded box to the right lists the staff, the course meeting times, the fact that it is an undergraduate course, and asks for feedback on OCW or this particular course. Clearly, publishing curricula and asking for comment and feedback, and allowing comparison and wide usage in different circumstances has lots of advantages, but the best may be--over time--a general increase in all curriculum. That's encouraging.

On the left-hand column is a simple navigation menu that lists "Course Home," "Syllabus," "Calendar," "Assignments," and "Projects." The image on the page is of what was a poster promoting the display, titled "Eleven," of the class projects of the eleven MIT students who took this course in the spring of 2003. (A nicely done "bread crumbs" trail allows you to know where you are at all times, regardless of how deep you dig.)