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Free Open CourseWare at MIT

 
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danielita



Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 281
Location: SLP

PostPosted: Mon May 28, 2007 10:00 pm    Post subject: Free Open CourseWare at MIT Reply with quote

Hey all,
MIT offers free open courseware at: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html You can study the courses and do the exercises that are available online. Sadly you don't get any credit for it, but there are some interesting topics listed--especially in the Foreign Language and Literature section.

D

MY Bad: Edited to remove the period...


Last edited by danielita on Tue May 29, 2007 10:33 pm; edited 1 time in total
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lozwich



Joined: 25 May 2003
Posts: 1536

PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 2:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oooh! Interesting! Thanks D!

For anyone who gets an error message just take the full stop/period off the end of the link and you'll get the page just fine.

Aeronautics course here I come!

Laughing Laughing
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merlin



Joined: 10 May 2004
Posts: 582
Location: Somewhere between Camelot and NeverNeverLand

PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 5:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Note that like any university course they have "required reading" lists and sometimes the texbooks alone can set you back a few hundred. And to get something from a course you usually have to read the text.

Funny thing. This might just show the redundancy of most University Professors, who just create a syllabus and lecture almost right out of the books with just a few additions. I learned a long time ago that I could just read a few old textbooks on many subjects and know as much as going to the course. e.g. Psychology and history.
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gaijinalways



Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279

PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 9:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Depends on the course. Obviously, most profs add a littl more than what's in the book, otherwise everyone ould be a prof! Cool
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abusalam4



Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 143

PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 10:26 am    Post subject: Profs and their courses Reply with quote

Yes, in a way, you are right - profs creating courses/course syllabi by defining some set reading (i.e., the textbook/s) and then add a little like objectives/requirements for the course.

I think there is no problem to do that for undergraduate courses and those at similar level. At graduate level, it is quite different......

I am working in a Far Distance study project offering entire degree programs at undergraduate and graduate level for for poor students from Third World Countries. They are no tuition fees, and in doing that work, we depend on a small number of expert volunteers who donate their time and other resources. To keep up to general academic standards, we may need to offer a course in a field where we (those volunteering) are not necessarily experts in, and we may not even have an expert for that field at hand.

The only obvious solution is to select and use a textbook for that field of study, read and study it first yourself. Then, build a syllabus file with instructions for study and eventual additional notes around it. FInally, compose and add an exam file containing follow-up problems (multiple choice problems, e.g.), essay section (for deeper analysis and reflection of the items studied) and eventually a section for project work (to apply in practice what the student has learned).

There are a number of graduate courses in my special field of study. Originally, I had the idea to write a brief syllabus file and then point to the set reading prescribed for that course. What I finally had in the end was an entire textbook for that field of study (which meanwhile has gone to press and was released for public sale). It is also incoproated as an e-book (digital version of the hard print) on the CD-ROMs and DVDs we send abroad to our students. It�s a cheap and non-costly way in doing something good to as many people as possible whom we can reach.

And yes, as we are a school "without walls", we have no central physical library. But as a decent school is also in need of that, we have gathered all reading matter required and publicly freely available (we do not want to violate anyone�s copyrights!) on a seperate DVD with a navigation system. This Digital Library DVD includes many materials in addition to our course materials which we have on separate CDs/DVDs. Our Digital Library by now includes a bit less than 7000 books and articles. It is quite a lot for a school project like ours covering only up to 3 different fields of study (one of them being Applied Linguistics and TESL).

In essence, sometime you can do quite a lot with humble means available and may cause to have it great effect! To see that it (mostly) works is a true blessing!

Have a great day!
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