* OCW is not an MIT education.
* OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
* OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
* Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.
I wonder if removing the nots will ever be considered a goal.
The final not I think is a goal that OCW is working towards. I doubt the first three will ever be goals.
* MIT is not the University of Phoenix. You have to attend the school to get an MIT education.
* OCW is a project to provide open courseware. It is not a school.
* MIT faculty have their primary responsibility to enrolled students and their research programs (and not necessarily in that order). It doesn't scale (e.g., is impossible) for OCW to grant access to them.
MIT is an excellent engineering school, but there are many others. Among other things, I think some of OCW's goals are to offer/help provide a superb curriculum for those schools -- where, if enrolled, you would be able to get an education, degree, and faculty access.
fwiw I have a masters from MIT, but no involvement with the ocw project.
In many cases it simply is not physically possible to do a course justice just through web materials. Of course, the obvious example is that in some classes the labs and lab equipment. However, it should also be noted that a lot of the value of some classes (whether they be MIT or somewhere else) comes from group projects and other group activities that either wouldn't be reasonable for an individual to complete, or wouldn't be nearly as helpful.
There'll probably always be an advantage to going to a physical university. But there are online Universities that provide an education, degree, and faculty access at widely ranging cost points.
The first two might be possible to offer free. Maybe.
The last one would be difficult to provide free. But maybe some sort of guided community support could give a 90/10 solution that could scale.
The goal of an MIT level education & certification available to anyone with the intelligence & time regardless of citizenship & economic situation comes with a huge amount of utility. Economic, social & otherwise. I believe it may also be very strategic in terms of world security & stability.
But an MIT level is not absolutely necessary. A tier 2 or 3 university level might be sufficient. Maybe as albertni mentions, they aim to provide a piece of the puzzle which can then be topped up with elements from other institutions. For the above to be goals, the whole thing doesn't need to fall on MIT's back.
Coursework can scale pretty much indefinitely. Certification, (i believe) can be made to scale quite well but MIT is probably not the place to go for this. Between those two, you don't seem that far from a free education. At least for the very driven students.
I was never a great example (or a great student), but for me these were the centres of gravity. Interactions that were important were mostly with tutors (mostly phd candidates or later year students) & other students. These would be harder to solve but maybe not impossible.
The point is that traditional, physical universities have not scaled. A minority of those intellectually capable have access to them.
We are actively working on removing the 'nots' at www.nixty.com. We believe that using open educational resources, faculty at other institutions, and an open accreditation process can go a long way towards providing a person a meaningful education.
Hey, I'm not complaining. I would have killed for this type of high quality information aggregated in one accessible place as a kid.
They are doing a benevolent thing with this project, but it simply cannot scale to accomplish the first three with any reasonable chance of success. I'll take what they have offered, which is plenty.
Anyone else having problems with VideoLectures? Most of the time the videos just hangs for me after a while and prett much always if I pause them for more than, say a minute.
