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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,
by ansy 15y ago
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.
- tokenadult 15y agoKhan 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/ http://www.aleks.com/ See an earlier HN comment in another thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515796 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 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_Editors#Chapter_Three:_The_future_.282007-present.29 http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...
- tzs 15y agoTextbooks 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.