On Open Education(thenextweb.com)

32 pointsby josefperezcr15 anni fa6 comments

http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/05/14/how-the-internet-is-revolutionizing-education/

I have found valuable resources on Open Education, some on the url, but also not so valuable. -Your opinion?

3 comments

ansy15 anni fa

Throwing up slides and recorded lectures is one thing. But most of these courses require you to buy the appropriate textbook which, while cheaper than tuition, isn't exactly a low barrier to entry. You really can't can't replace a college course with an audiobook. You need problem sets and reference materials, too. If there's a programming assignment sometimes tools and sample code are provided in the lab environment, but the open course version typically just puts up a scan of the handout. There are exceptions, but complete online courses is certainly not the rule in my experience.

Khan Academy has a nice web app that auto generates solvable problems for various subjects. But even those kind of lack the quality of regular problem sets. For most of the subjects I tried you just get the same problem over and over again with different constants until you switch subjects.

Basically it's nice that all these universities are making lectures available. But open textbooks and problem sets are really what's needed next in my opinion.

Also, it would be nice if there was a Wikipedia of course material where editors could construct a course out of the best pieces from all of these university sites. Especially considering so many are piecemeal as is.

tokenadult15 anni fa

Khan Academy has a nice web app that auto generates solvable problems for various subjects. But even those kind of lack the quality of regular problem sets.

Yes. I am sure this is something that the Khan Academy people expect to be working on for quite a few years, building better sets of problems that are amenable to online scoring. One current attempt at that (which works better than Khan Academy, in my opinion) is ALEKS.

http://www.aleks.com/

See an earlier HN comment in another thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515796

for quotations from mathematicians about the distinction between exercises and problems in learning mathematics.

As for your thought about a "Wikipedia of course material," there is already Wikibooks,

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

but it is the backwater of Wikimedia Foundation projects (often becoming a hang-out for editors banned from other Wikimedia Foundation projects) and has few active editors. It's tough to get good-quality academic work out of unpaid volunteers.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...

tzs15 anni fa

Textbooks aren't too bad if you can find the international edition. This is usually exactly the same as the US edition, except it is paperback and costs a lot less.

For instance, take "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, et al., used in one of the MIT OpenCourseware algorithms courses. $20-30 vs about $130 for the US edition.

Or take Apostol, "Calculus", used in the OpenCourseware calculus with theory course. $20-30 vs. $150-200 for the US edition.

Or how about Resnick's "Introduction to Special Relativity", used in an OpenCourseware relativity course. $15-25, compared to $120 for the US edition.

In all cases I'm talking about new books, latest edition, not used or older editions.

The low end of the price range for the international editions comes from buying from an oversee seller, with India usually having the cheapest, although occasionally a Chinese seller is the cheapest. The book will often only be $5-10 from such sources, but shipping will be high. In most cases, there are also a couple of sellers in the US. The books will typically be around $20 from a US seller, but shipping will be much lower than from India.

You can find these deals via Biblio.com or AbeBooks.com.

magnitude15 anni fa

The problem with open education is that unless you are using it for self fulfillment or self-driven applications, the general public does not recognize or appreciate the learner's efforts. For example, I am considering to go back to school for a graduate degree but I have all of the courses that I want to take available for free online. Heck, there is even other non-university affiliated material on the web like free ebooks that I am really interested in studying. But the problem is no future employer will recognize my studies if I go the free open route. If I spend the next two years self studying, saving thousands of dollars in tuition and learning from the comfort of home, every employer would look at it as wasted time. But if I spent the same exact time commitment and had no part-time jobs but learned all of the material in an institution then in the eyes of the employer I didn't waste time and I productively went to school. This is annoying.

I guess what is needed is a free certification program that corresponds with the open education movement. But I don't want a certification program that looks cheap. I want certification that is prestigious and representative of my intelligence and hard efforts, just like as if I was to get a graduate degree from stanford.

dvse15 anni fa

One way to demonstrate your knowledge in a technical field like engineering or computer science would be to publish some research papers in well known journals or conferences. By no means perfect but much better than nothing.

This is not to say that some new form of certification is not needed as well.

Wilduck15 anni fa

This is an interesting list of online learning resources, but I'd really like to see some objective measurement of the success of these programs. Are there any studies about:

A) The effectiveness of online versus traditional education?

B) The best ways to go about learning/teaching online?