Rave: OpenCourseWare @ MIT, other institutions, and iTunes U

(image courtesy of Flickr user Temari 09, licensed under the Creative Commons)

For awhile now, my alma mater, MIT, has been building a sizable collection of course information dubbed OpenCourseWare. The collection was in its infancy while I was at MIT and some professors were skeptical of making their entire lesson plans and course materials available publicly. After all, they’re being paid to train MIT students and offer something unique or different from what what is offered elsewhere. So if all of their materials were available, what’s to stop another school or professor from claiming to offer the same education as MIT? Okay, so I don’t know of any professors who truly espoused that opinion, but it’s certainly a concern. Nevertheless, the prevailing wisdom seems to instead focus on how this information can increase access to information and help professors at various institutions refine their courses, become better teachers and ultimately raise the tide, so to speak.

Some 5+ years later, and there are over 1,900 (!!) courses with information available in the MIT OCW catalog. And MIT isn’t the only place that does this. In fact, there’s an entire OpenCourseWare Consortium with universities from around the world offering content.  Harvard, Princeton, Stanford*, Yale, and a number of other high caliber schools also offer lectures online, for free**.   now one can even find video lectures for certain courses (perhaps this further erodes some of the mystique or advantage offered by MIT but I would contend that the mere presentation of information, without the interactive community and overall experience, isn’t what sets MIT and its graduates apart). I’m amazed by the wealth of information that is available! I wasn’t a computer science major, but now I can go back and get the course information that I missed out on while there. I can explore areas that interest me now that were somewhere on the other side of the world when I was actually taking and choosing classes.

What a fabulous resource! And now, many of the video lectures from MIT (and a lot of other schools) are available on iTunes under the iTunes U section, where you can subscribe to entire courses, browse by subject or institution and get your complete fix of learning in your home or on the go. Another option is to explore Academic Earth, which opened earlier this year and aggregates a lot of the course and lecture information from across a number of institutions (a brief look at the computer science section, page 1, shows courses from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley).

Me? I’m picking up some knowledge about computer programming…

(image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer, licensed under the Creative Commons)

*I’m a little disappointed that the Stanford materials are only accessible through iTunes. While I admit that the iTunes U offerings are quite nice and offer a level of convenience in finding this information, I hate the idea of being locked into a particular piece of software or vendor in order to access content that could easily be played on a number of different platforms & devices.

**Some of the institutions offer solely the lectures, others offer course materials as well, and there are a number of models somewhere in between.