For Those Who Like Things Open – Check Out OpenCourseware ~mw
Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 07:00 PM EDT

Our readers are a curious bunch, and I never cease to be amazed at the knowledge they possess. Still, I suspect most of you are life-long learners. Although you may already be aware of it, you now have the opportunity to take college level courses on a vast array of subjects. There is no course credit, but you also don’t have to pay for the courses.

The program is Open Courseware, and it is brought to you by MIT, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan and many other nationally recognized universities. For those of you wanting to brush up on your computer science, there are more than 50 courses, including courses on how to build mobile phone apps for both Android and iOS. There are courses on information technology, web design, accounting, statistics, math, writing, and numerous other areas.

We normally don’t plug the services of others, but given the open nature of Open Courseware, this one seems to fall in our sandbox. Worth checking out.


  


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OpenCourseware checkout — on my list
Authored by: hardmath on Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 07:27 PM EDT

I’ve been doing some tutoring for college calculus with a student in an online course. The computerized aspects leave much to be improved upon.

The course textbook costs the same as what you’d pay for a hardback college text, which is a lot, $200+. But the “features” of the online text are first, that it expires when the semester is over, and second, that it logs you out every 45 minutes or so.

Also, being a college calculus textbook, there’s an Appendix in the back of the book with a table of integrals. The Appendix is missing in the online version.

I have seen this sort of thing in other online courses (disappearing course materials that you pay for above and beyond the tuition), and it disturbs me. Math and Stats course materials at the undergraduate level are _really_ not evolving in any substantive way.

But I’m afraid I’ve gotten myself worked up now.

—
Recursion is the opprobrium of the mathists.

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Another option
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 08:02 PM EDT
Edx.org is done by Mit, Harvard, and a few others, is free,
and if you complete the courses, you get a printed
certificate mailed to you, no charge.

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Corrections Thread Here…
Authored by: lnuss on Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 09:16 PM EDT
Of course there’s not much to correct, but…

—
Larry N.

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Off Topic Thread Here…
Authored by: lnuss on Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 09:17 PM EDT
…

—
Larry N.

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Newspicks Thread Here…
Authored by: lnuss on Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 09:18 PM EDT
…

—
Larry N.

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COMES Thread Here…
Authored by: lnuss on Tuesday, April 16 2013 @ 09:18 PM EDT
…

—
Larry N.

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Some great tutorials at Lawrence Livermore National Lab
Authored by: SirHumphrey on Wednesday, April 17 2013 @ 04:34 AM EDT
Parallel Computing https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/

Tutorials Link https://computing.llnl.gov/?set=training&page=index#training_materials

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For Those Who Like Things Open – Check Out OpenCourseware ~mw
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 17 2013 @ 10:05 AM EDT
I’m going to MIT in 1990, refreshing my linear algebra.

It’s just like college, except I can bring my, er,
refreshments, to class.

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A Few more for you
Authored by: hAckz0r on Wednesday, April 17 2013 @ 02:01 PM EDT
Here are a few more for anyone that enjoys learning:

physicsstream.ucsd.edu
slac. stanford.edu
khanacademy.org
stanford.edu
archive.org
ll.mit.edu video
videolectures.net mit_ocw
videolectures.net tudelft_ocw
videolectures.net uci_ocw
videolectures.net Physics
podcasts.ox.ac.uk all
unctv.org

So much to do, so little time…

—
The Investors IP Law: The future health of a Corporation is measured as the inverse of the number of IP lawsuits they are currently litigating.

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Fake "Open" — Refer to the Free Software Definition
Authored by: Steve on Wednesday, April 17 2013 @ 03:45 PM EDT

This “Open Courseware” is not open as most members of Groklaw understand the term. Whether you look at it through the lens of the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, or the Debian guidelines, these courses are neither Free nor Open. They are gratis (“free as in beer”), and they are sharable under certain restrictions, but that’s not the same thing.

Let’s use the FSF’s Free Software Definition as an example. FSF sets forth a list of freedoms that must be respected.

The MIT courses are placed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. Most of those terms are fine, but NonCommercial violates the Free Software Definition.

To quote from FSF: “Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere.” The CC NonCommercial term violates that precept and similarly violates the OSI and Debian protocols.

Other universities place similar restrictions; in fact, most of them use the same license (CC-BY-NC-SA). But that kind of repackaging, remixing, and redistribution for a fee is precisely a core freedom of Free/Libre and Open Source thinking.

The universities could have used a truly free/libre/open license like CC-BY-SA. They chose to use a non-free, non-open license and then apply the intentionally confusing moniker “Open Courseware.”

That seems like something important to point out.

—
IAALBIANYL

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Open Access but Closed Doors?
Authored by: capt.Hij on Thursday, April 18 2013 @ 11:12 AM EDT
So I tried to search the web to get information on this
online course directory. I cannot find a way for faculty to
submit their own courses for inclusion and could not find a
way for an institution to try to register so that their
faculty could register. They offer links to modifiable
content (w/ restrictions on commercial use) but it does not
seem to be much more than that.

How can I find more information on it?

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MongoDB Courses – from personal experience, excellent
Authored by: ian.waring on Friday, April 19 2013 @ 07:48 AM EDT

10gen use the edX platform to deliver their free, 7 week long, 10 hours/week “MongoDB for Developers” and “MongoDB for DBA” courses. I’m completed both, as have over 10,000 people to date. The Developers Course comes in both Python and Java variants. Really well executed, and thoroughly recommended.

Details/registration at 10gen Education

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