Opening Up Course Ware: What’s Great and What’s Missing from MIT’s New Scheme by risa
“Through MIT OpenCourseWare, educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.” MIT President Susan Hockfield
MIT has lept onboard the expanding of the open source metaphor/process in an interesting new way by serving up the detailed class lectures and assignments for hundreds of undergrad and graduate courses. This large offering of powerpoint presentations and other digitized frameworks for lectures and discussions is a space-binding of all but the intangible bits of the oral communication that goes on in classrooms at MIT.
Open Course Ware show how knowledge has been ordered at MIT; how decisions are being made there about the boundaries between disciplines; or the theories that are becoming accepted fact. It’s a sharing not just of authoritative answers, but of the questions being asked. When these kinds of courseware are articulated to class or subject forums where the oral element of being in a class can also happen online, then the Academy will have come even closer to re-creating the layered system of open sourced communication that produces open source software.
There have been all kinds of disconnected attempts by individual prof’s to share their courses in this way, but by bringing it all together under the official flag of MIT, and embracing the the evolution of the idea of Open Source, MIT makes a decidedly cool statement. Some hackers may hate this, because it’s yet another example of the use of open source as a brand. Personally, I’m already neck-deep in Professor Eytan Modiano’s first lecture on Communication Systems Engineering, and I’m happy to be there.
If anyone else wants to try and “take” one of these classes and talk about it, feel free to email me or make your desires known on Open forums and I’ll do my meager best to make my way through it with you.
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