At First Glance--And Later On
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.)
The students explored themes of "peace in an unpeaceful world," and
six of the eleven have permitted their projects to be available along with the
professor's class materials on the OCW Web site--as PDF documents.
The class syllabus is simple. A description of the intent of the class, a single
text assignment to a 20-year-old book, Theory and Design in the First Machine
Age, a note about grading, a note about enrollment limitations, and a note about
a studio fee required of enrollees. The class calendar lists "sessions,"
many of which are "computer studio," "design," "critique,"
and so forth. The assignments page has more depth, linking to PDF documents
of "problem sets" assigned to students, along with a notation of when
they were assigned.
"Problem Set 2," sends the students out with a digital camera and
a list of images they are to locate and capture. At the same time, related "Storytelling
Notes" list a number of films such as "Fallen Angels," directed
by Wong Kar-Wai--and a list of features to be noted during each film. It is
difficult to tell if the films were screened in class or assigned out of class.
"Problem Set 4/5" requires the design and production of several assignments,
all relating to a fictional campaign for the MIT student body government on
the part of the student. For example: "PRINT: Design one 8.5" by 11"
poster for your campaign for a specific UA office. You can use monochrome type
in any manner you wish--stretch it, torture it, adore it."
One example of a student project is titled "Butterflies of War,"
and uses a nature scene with digitally modified Sherman tanks as "tank
butterflies" engaged in a battle. The student found a great deal of meaning
in the ludicrous notion of butterflies fighting wars. Another's, "The Suh
State," makes an analogy--visually--between the Stalinist authoritarian
state and MIT's campus, by staging a series of political campaign photographs
in such a way as to emphasize the most drab, least humanistic views of MIT that
the student could find.
So, completing the loop . . . after I made my graduate school decision and
attended the University of Michigan, I frequently wondered--at first, until
I learned otherwise--whether faculty compared class syllabi or collaborated
on them. Over time, I learned that for many research-oriented faculty, very
little time was spent in doing anything with the curriculum, much less comparing
content and creative ideas with others.
MIT reports that many others are using and comparing curricula through OCW,
with favorable results. Huge amounts of the content are being translated into
Spanish, Portugese, Chinese, and more. The next OCW initiative is to encourage
faculty from other institutions to publish their courses within OCW. Once that
starts happening with regularity, the synergy of faculty being able to look
at and compare, and collect the most appropriate parts from various courses,
should have a hugely positive effect on teaching and learning.
Frankly, I don't know who on any given campus would be the person to decide
to cooperate or not, as an institution, but if you know who that is on your
campus I urge you to at least suggest this possibility to them. And if not,
well, then you can do a lot of learning about IT yourself--for free!
