Intellectual Philanthropy

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Wow, thanks, this is a great resource.  I have the time, but, question is, do I have the discipline, to re-learn, at a higher level,  all of my electrical circuit theory studies?  I've been feeling like crap lately thinking of how much I used to know but have completely forgotten.  I noticed, by the way, that MIT's literature dept., like many others, has more regard for Morisson than Pynchon.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>

>
>Online 'intellectual philanthropy' attracts students
>from every nation on earth.
>
>By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian
>Science Monitor
>
>
>By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800
>courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious
>universities will be available online to anyone in the
>world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to
>register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.
>
>The cost? It's all free of charge.
>
>The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the
>Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002
>and now spread to some 120 other universities
>worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the
>ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an
>Internet connection and a desire to learn.
>
>Intended as an act of "intellectual philanthropy,"
>OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course
>materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures,
>notes, homework assignments, illustrations, and so on.
>So far, by giving away their content, the universities
>aren't discouraging students from enrolling as
>students. Instead, the online materials appear to be
>only whetting appetites for more.
>
>"We believe strongly that education can be best
>advanced when knowledge is shared openly and freely,"
>says Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW
>program at MIT. "MIT is using the power of the
>Internet to give away all of the educational materials
>created here."
>
>The MIT site (ocw.mit.edu), along with companion sites
>that translate the material into other languages, now
>average about 1.4 million visits per month from
>learners "in every single country on the planet," Ms.
>Margulies says. Those include Iraq, Darfur, "even
>Antarctica," she says. "We hear from [the online
>students] all the time with inspirational stories
>about how they are using these materials to change
>their lives. They're really, really motivated."
>
>So-called "distance learning" over the Internet isn't
>new. Students have been able to pay for online courses
>at many institutions, either to receive credit or
>simply as a noncredit adult-learning experience. Many
>universities also offer free podcasts (audio or
>sometimes video material delivered via the Internet).
>
>But the sheer volume and variety of the educational
>materials being released by MIT and its OCW
>collaborators is nothing less than stunning.
>
>For example, each of the 29 courses that Tufts
>University in Medford, Mass., has put online so far is
>"literally the size of a textbook," says Mary Lee,
>associate provost and point person for the OCW effort
>there. The material provides much more than "a
>skeleton of a course," she says. Visitors to Tufts'
>OCW course on "Wildlife Medicine" call it is the most
>comprehensive website on that topic in the world, Dr.
>Lee says.
>
>What OCW is not, its supporters agree, is a substitute
>for attending a university.
>
>For one thing, OCW learners aren't able to receive
>feedback from a professor - or to discuss the course
>with fellow students. A college education is "really
>the total package of students interacting with other
>students, forming networks, interacting with faculty,
>and that whole environment of being associated with
>the school," says James Yager, a senior associate dean
>at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns
>Hopkins University in Baltimore. He oversees the OCW
>program there. His school of public health now offers
>nearly 40 of its most popular courses for free via
>OCW. The school's goal is to put 90 to 100 of its 200
>or so core courses online within the next year or so.
>In November, learners from places such as Taiwan,
>Britain, Australia, Singapore, Germany, Japan, and the
>Netherlands logged some 80,000 page views of OCW
>course material, Dr. Yager says.
>
>MIT's initiative began with the idea of giving faculty
>at other universities access to how professors at MIT
>approached teaching a subject. But after the OCW
>project went online, the school quickly realized it
>had two other huge constituencies: students at other
>colleges, who wanted to augment what they were
>learning, and "self learners," those not pursuing a
>formal education but interested in increasing their
>knowledge.
>
>Along with course content, MIT also wanted to showcase
>its teaching methods. Many schools follow a
>traditional model, teaching the theory first, then
>allowing students to practice what they've learned.
>MIT has a "practice, theory, practice" way of
>teaching, Margulies says, that aims to get students
>engaged and energized immediately - before delving
>much into theory.
>
>Younes Attaourti, a physics professor in Marrakesh,
>Morocco, stumbled upon MIT's OCW site while surfing
>the Net. He's used the materials as the basis for
>courses he's taught on statistical physics and quantum
>theory of fields. And for his own learning, he's
>downloaded theoretical physics courses and one on
>ultrafast optics. "I don't think there is another
>university elsewhere in the world that is more
>generous," he writes in an e-mail: "[T]his is the
>first time that many people around the world are able
>to have access to top-quality courses."
>
>Phillipa Williams is an adult (40-something) student
>at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New
>Zealand, studying mathematics ("don't groan, I love
>it!" she writes in an e-mail). She's worked her way
>through many of the OCW undergraduate mathematics
>courses, she says, because they provide "a different
>viewpoint, another explanation of material," as well
>as different practice questions.
>
>MIT's OCW website features even more glowing feedback
>from learners. "[B]ecause of money, many good students
>with great talent and [who are] diligent do not have
>the chance to learn the newest knowledge and
>understanding of the universe," says Chen Zhiying, a
>student in the People's Republic of China. "But now,
>due to the OCW, the knowledge will spread to more and
>more people, and it will benefit the whole [world of]
>human-beings."
>
>"The MIT OCW program is a generous and far-sighted
>initiative that will do more to change the world for
>the better than a thousand Iraq-style invasions," the
>MIT site quotes Leigh Pascoe, a self-learner in Paris,
>as saying. "It does much to restore my faith in the
>enlightenment of the American people and their great
>experiment in democracy. This program should be
>emulated by every university worthy of the name."
>
>Besides MIT, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins, the OCW
>consortium (ocwconsor tium.org) in the United States
>includes among its members Michigan State, Michigan,
>Notre Dame, and Utah State. Internationally, members
>include groups of universities in China, Japan, and
>Spain.
>
>So far MIT has published 1,550 of its courses for OCW
>and plans to get the rest online by the end of this
>year. The materials for each course vary. Full videos
>of lectures, one of the most popular features, are
>available for only 26 courses, about 1,000 hours of
>video in all. "We'd like to do more video because it's
>really quite popular and our users love it," Marguiles
>says. "But it's quite expensive." The program relies
>on "generous support" from foundations, individuals,
>and MIT itself for funding, she says.
>
>Schools like Tufts and Johns Hopkins were able to
>jump-start their OCW programs quickly because the
>schools had already committed themselves for many
>years to putting all their classroom materials online
>for use by their own students. The biggest job has
>been to vet the materials for copyright issues,
>so-called "copyright scrubbing," Lee and Yager say. If
>permission cannot be obtained for a specific photo or
>chart, it must be left out of the OCW version or a
>substitute found.
>
>The OCW effort is part of a wide range of dynamic
>educational content emerging on the Internet, says Dan
>Colman, associate dean and director of Stanford
>University's continuing studies program and host of
>the website oculture.com, which highlights what's
>happening in Web-based education, with an emphasis on
>podcasts.
>
>Full-fledged online courses "might eventually offer a
>viable alternative to the classroom, but right now we
>have a ways to go," he writes via e-mail. Podcasts,
>for example, let learners hear a lecture, but they
>don't require that the listener write a critical essay
>or take part in a classroom discussion - activities
>that are a key element of the learning process, Mr.
>Colman says.
>
>And technology still needs to advance a bit more too.
>"We'll need a very fast fiber network and
>communication tools that give courses a greater degree
>of immediacy and sociability before this [online]
>model will become a real option educationally and
>economically," he says. "In the meantime, the
>traditional classroom is fairly safe."
>
>For example, lab work, which usually requires close
>hands-on collaboration between an instructor and
>students, remains problematic online, Yager points
>out.
>
>The losers in putting free content online aren't
>likely to be universities, which will continue to
>attract young students, Colman says. But free podcasts
>and OCW courses may pull adult learners away from
>other leisure activities, he says, such as reading
>books, watching educational television shows, or
>buying recordings of books or lectures. "All of these
>entities could suffer as users find free high-quality
>information on the Web," Colman says.
>
>http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0104/p13s 02-legn.html
>
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070104/ts _csm/cmit
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
>http://mail.yahoo.com