[HN Gopher] MIT OpenCourseWare
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MIT OpenCourseWare
Author : gjvc
Score : 223 points
Date : 2021-07-09 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ocw.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ocw.mit.edu)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| something from this site gets posted almost every single month on
| here, anything new from this share?
| gjvc wrote:
| Such an amazing resource.
| gumby wrote:
| About a decade ago I needed to know thermo ... a subject I had
| really disliked as an undergraduate. So I went to OCW and read
| what seemed to be the same course I'd taken when I was in school.
| I skipped the lectures, but the course materials were vastly
| superior to what we'd had. Really glad mit does this.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I fondly remember learning about OCW for the first time, about
| 10ish years ago. As a fresh engineer in India, on the cusp of
| _just_ moving to cheap broadband, at blazing speeds of 5 mbps, I
| was giddy with excitement of learning from the same lectures an
| MIT student gets to learn.
|
| While I did not learn much, in terms of actual syllabus, I did
| get exposed to a refreshing teaching style of exploratory
| learning.
|
| It helped me learn how to learn, how to approach a subject or
| problem, how to be confident as a learner.
|
| I have never looked back. Today, I am confident that I can learn
| any subject, with the right books and practice. That confidence
| helped me grow as an engineer in my job.
|
| Even today, I view these courses and new ones all the time.
|
| An added side effect was the opening up of learning resources
| from Stanford, Yale, etc.
| brainless wrote:
| I can totally relate to this and remember the first OCW. Also
| from India, I always feel that the web of that era pushed a lot
| with regards to making an open, knowledge sharing platform.
|
| I remember walking into random rooms on Freenode from MIT (I
| think) and seeing well known people/professors in there. It was
| such an inspiration to keep learning.
| linux_devil wrote:
| Agree and I would like to echo you. I feel I owe so much to OCW
| , fundamentals and concepts helped me through early career here
| in India.
| _e wrote:
| Coursera's Learning to Learn class by Barbara Oakley and her
| book "Mind for Numbers" [0] really changed my life. Can you
| point to specific courses and or books, from MIT's
| OpenCourseWare, that helped you become a confident learner?
|
| [0] https://barbaraoakley.com/books/a-mind-for-numbers/
| blooalien wrote:
| > "It helped me learn how to learn" ...
|
| Raised in the USA, I was extremely fortunate (so many students
| here and abroad miss out on the sheer good luck of getting
| several really great teachers in back-to-back succession in
| school) to have been exposed to some really _amazing_ teachers
| early in life who taught this _exact_ lesson. Their view of
| teaching was that if they taught students how to rely on rote
| book-learning without teaching an accompanying "thirst for
| knowledge" and the tools to gain that knowledge, then they'd
| failed at their job as teachers.
|
| When these universities first started releasing so much of
| their courseware openly like this, I viewed it as one of the
| great triumphs of the modern Internet, and a huge boon for
| humanity. I am glad that humanity now has such an abundance of
| great learning materials available so readily, and saddened by
| how few humans choose to avail themselves of such opportunity.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| This is still by far the best resource of what has sadly become a
| money-grabbing fad.
|
| PDFs of the full lectures, labs,quizzes, also videos. The same
| material the kids at MIT take.
|
| No bullshit,no signing up needed, no irrelevant 'degrees' (Mini-
| nano-pico specialization) for 2000 USD, no worthless
| certificates, no cumbersome "learning systems" splitting a 45 min
| lecture in 30 micro-videos with inane and obtrusive questions in
| the middle.
|
| Since it is so useful and it doesnt make anybody rich, naturally
| it needs to die.
| zant wrote:
| In my personal experience, I find extremely difficult to stick
| with the courses that are mostly video based. Not just from OCW
| but Coursera, edX, etc.
|
| But what I found is that, for me, a really good way to start
| learning a new subject is studying from Lecture Notes.
|
| These are generally less dense and more tractable than a whole
| textbook, and at the same time, you get the written form which I
| find a bit easier to follow than multiple hours of video.
|
| Of course you miss the depth in some cases, but as introductory
| content I find them really to the point and easing the learning
| curve.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I've found that if there's a project at the end (like in Free
| Code Camp (I think one or all of those may be a single word), I
| tend to do much better. Not only does it help me cement things
| into my brain, but it motivates me to keep going. Not to
| mention, the learning I get from the videos is OK, but the real
| learning comes from what I look up to solve the practical.
| xmprt wrote:
| My issue with lecture notes has been that I always read through
| them too quickly to grasp the material. On the other hand,
| videos seem perfectly paced for me or I can change the speed
| and rewatch things that don't make sense.
|
| There's an aspect of change over time that you get which isn't
| that easy to show on paper. It helps me better relate one
| concept to the next.
| pdevr wrote:
| What's the best non-monetary way to give back to the MIT OCW
| program?
| andrewlgood wrote:
| They actually have a page on the site for this -
| https://ocw.mit.edu/give/other-ways-to-contribute/
|
| Nothing exciting. Send them feedback on how OCW made a
| difference in your life and spread the word.
| orzig wrote:
| Reminds me of the education blogger who did the whole MIT CS
| curriculum in 12 months:
| https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
| lenkite wrote:
| The material at https://openlearninglibrary.mit.edu/ appears a
| bit more up2date.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| True, but incomplete.
|
| Filtering just EE/CS, there are 30 or 35 courses with full
| video lectures on ocw.mit.edu (which are all hosted on Youtube
| AFAIK). OLL seems to have four.
|
| Sometimes lectures are linked on a class website e.g. the
| modern Underactuated Robotics lectures:
| https://underactuated.mit.edu/
|
| If you're going down the rabbit hole, search
| "site:https://video.odl.mit.edu/collections/" or
| videolectures.net or archive.org, or you can search MIT's
| student pages for class assignments. Honestly, this is the only
| way to find substantial info on some entire fields e.g.
| Thermal-Fluids Engineering (2.005 and 2.006) ... or Course 2,
| in general.
|
| It helps to learn a specific school's curriculum (Stanford and
| Berkeley also have great resources) and target specific
| courses. You won't find lectures such as MIT's Inference course
| by looking on Youtube and OCW alone.
|
| [Not just replying to parent comment] If you plan to teach,
| sample some lectures by Patrick Winston, Anant Agarwal, Donald
| Sadoway, robert ghrist, and/or David Malan. The modern approach
| to engineering instruction seems to be 5 to 15 minute snippets
| posted online, but these five are among my favorite when it
| comes to full lectures.
| gjvc wrote:
| "Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration
| required."
|
| In this day and age, when some sites want you to register for the
| most inconsequential of services / downloads, this really is a
| breath of fresh air.
| wirthjason wrote:
| All of these materials are great but they are no substitute for
| in-person instruction and feedback (I don't mean sitting in a
| lecture hall watching a professor scribble on the blackboard for
| an hour).
|
| The real value of a professor is that because they know the
| material they can see the gap in your knowledge, where you're
| making the mistake, and quickly get you over the hurdle.
|
| This is hard to do when learning by yourself because if you had
| the knowledge you wouldn't have gotten stuck in the first place.
|
| I wish there were better communities around learning. Discussion
| bards, forums, etc. have been terrible substitutes in my opinion
| for in-person learning. Often a big part of my learning comes
| from helping and discussing the problems with classmates. I've
| learned as much from my peers as I have from professors.
| [deleted]
| crispyambulance wrote:
| There's relatively new instructional strategy called the
| "inverted classroom"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). It's where
| students read texts and watch online lectures by master
| instructors, but then go to in-person classrooms to work on
| problems and get tutoring with individual attention, and the
| opportunity to interact with other students.
|
| The advantage is that students get really comprehensive
| exposure to the material. First from a formal lecture and then
| from in-classroom attention with questions and practice. It's
| sort of like standard college lectures and recitations with
| TA's except there's more emphasis on the recitations and the
| lectures are from really excellent instructors.
| sidr wrote:
| This is just a rebranding/reinvention of the tutorial system
| at Oxbridge, so not really that new.
| wirthjason wrote:
| I'm not familiar with it. Do you have more details on how
| the system works? Was it happening pre-YouTube-ization of
| education?
| toxik wrote:
| It really isn't, you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss
| things.
| tbihl wrote:
| This is the way all my successful courses were in secondary
| and post secondary school years ago, except with textbooks
| rather than videos. The inverted classroom is just learning
| correctly for people who can't use textbooks (which can be a
| difficult skill, so I don't mean to denigrate the
| improvement.)
| xmprt wrote:
| I had one class like this in college and I loved it. It can
| be a mixed bag though. I think a lot of people came (and
| continued to come) to lecture thinking it would be a normal
| lecture so they wouldn't do any of the reading/slides before
| class. I'm not sure what they got out of it. On the other
| hand, knowing the material allowed me to follow along with
| what was being said and even predict some of the points the
| professor wasn't going to make in the future.
| wirthjason wrote:
| I remember hearing this from Sol Khan, who must be a fan of
| Plato because he went on to form an academy.
|
| I'd like to experience it. The model didn't get started until
| after I finished college. I've done online classes, but they
| miss the in-person dialog component.
|
| In general the problem is that administration wants to see
| education "scale" and the flipper classroom is tied to
| people. You have to get everyone together at the same time
| and same place (in-person is best, but I guess Zoom might
| substitute). This puts a ceiling on scaling.
| owl57 wrote:
| > I guess Zoom might substitute
|
| Yes, but not for everyone. I used the pandemic as a chance
| to get back into classroom and ask a lot of questions, and
| even deliberately chose my spring courses to be online
| every evening from Monday to Friday, wouldn't pull that off
| with commute. But I'm sure other people can get much more
| in-person, when the interaction starts with eye contact and
| not only when the student is bold enough to unmute.
| bluGill wrote:
| Lectures scale well. Once there over more than around 30
| people in the room it isn't possible be interactive anyway.
| So a video of the best lecturer is better than the average
| lecturer in person. That video of the lecture can have a
| few students (ideally plants who are scripted to ask the
| right questions - though this is not an easy thing to get
| right), but for the most part once you are over 30 students
| nobody is interactive anyway.
|
| You still need that interactive instruction. The worse
| professor I had in college was still better than the ones
| at MIT - I've never been in the same state as MIT which
| means they were terrible at interacting with me. And of
| course the in person interaction does not scale.
| [deleted]
| Frost1x wrote:
| The issue with all this is that, professionally, we're held by
| businesses and clients to basically know everything (then
| there's the legal liabilities I won't touch on).
|
| So the culture is, any admission of ignorance or clear signs of
| knowledge gaps labels you culturally as being incompetent in
| your field or profession. So this problem stems well beyond
| school. In school you get a pass of being ignorant. Once you
| leave, people falsely assume you somehow miraculously have no
| knowledge gaps which just isn't remotely realistic for any
| human. Everyone always has knowledge gaps in some context,
| including their own fields and even specialities.
|
| We need to change the culture so people can admit or show signs
| of these gaps to improve. I do it often, if I'm sitting in a
| meeting somewhere and don't know something I let people know I
| don't know and will fill that gap or ask them to explain so I
| can learn. This, from my experience, has made more cohesive
| teams because people are then more willing to admit their own
| gaps and teams begin to work together more now there's a bit of
| a humility baseline.
| behnamoh wrote:
| The best learning method I've experienced was in a course in
| which we had to summarize a relevant paper in 2 pages for the
| professor. I have to admit that I didn't learn anything from
| the professor __in__ the class, but reading a paper (which I
| chose) and summarizing it was immensely rewarding. In addition
| to reading the paper (which was pretty technical), I watched
| YouTube videos of the authors explaining the ideas in simple
| terms and read about the intuition on their DeepMind webpage.
| There was this comment on the paper which I read on Reddit (or
| maybe YT) that basically introduced me to the whole field of
| transfer learning, which then led me to my current research
| area. To think that all of this started with one paper (and
| another course which also touched upon transfer learning but
| from a causal perspective---"transportability") makes me
| appreciate this method of learning.
|
| It's not even learn by doing. It's learn by not knowing. The
| past couple months literally felt walking in uncharted
| territory because no one in my school knows about my current
| research method (so no professor can spot my knowledge gap). I
| have felt down, up, excited, and anxious as I tread carefully
| in an area in which I have more knowledge-gap than I have
| knowledge. A sense of suspense and fear, but also great
| pleasure that comes with exploring something that few people in
| my field would even try. It's risky but I like it.
| gjvc wrote:
| It's not supposed to be a substitute, it's the next best thing
| to being there, when "there" is twenty years and three thousand
| miles away.
|
| And it's free, for goodness sake.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Many, many times I wished someone had had the foresight to record
| (only audio was practical at the time) the lectures I had in
| college.
| akshaykumar90 wrote:
| I want to call out the Introduction to Algorithms [0] course
| which was the gateway drug into the online courses for me back in
| ~2009. I learnt CS from this and other open courses from MIT and
| Berkeley and would forever be grateful for these resources.
|
| [0]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
| compu...
| [deleted]
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| The original SICP course is up on OCW, watched it years ago and
| it was a treat:
|
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
|
| The link says 2005 but don't worry, it is 100% not from 2005, as
| the video production, hair styles, and general demeanor of people
| in the video will attest.
|
| > These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay
| Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July
| 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced
| by Hewlett-Packard Television. These videos are also available
| here under a Creative Commons license compatible with commercial
| use.
| arvindamirtaa wrote:
| OCW tends to everything about the course, except the video
| lectures.
|
| I've seen so many courses with newer course-dates but the
| lectures alone are from older editions of the same course.
| swiley wrote:
| They really don't need to re-do the lectures every year, you
| only need them once.
|
| What's kind of sad are the upper level/graduate courses with
| no lectures, or the ones that have lectures cut out for IP
| reasons.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why are they redoing the rest of the course then? If the
| only change is the date then things are fine. However
| research does move on, if they need to redo the course
| materials for any reason that needs to include the
| lectures.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| It still takes time and money to record videos or collect
| assignments and ensure legal compliance, privacy,
| accessibility, etc. which often utilizes student labor,
| where there's an opportunity cost. That is, students,
| professors, and everyone in-between could be frying
| bigger fish.
|
| If a course is teaching computer architecture and
| switches from a hypothetical instruction set to RISC-V,
| the core of the instruction hasn't changed---memory
| layout, instruction ordering, digital system concepts.
|
| (The nice thing, Silvina Hanono Wachman uploads a
| privately recorded version of each semester of the
| computer architecture class, so we get the classic Chris
| Terman instruction as well as the modern variant.)
|
| With that in mind, some classes will have a higher
| relevance churn rate than others and should be updated
| more often. Other classes might have historically had an
| amazing instructor and no major development and thus need
| a really compelling reason to be replaced. (MIT's
| Introductory Physics comes to mind.)
| owl57 wrote:
| > Other classes might have historically had an amazing
| instructor and no major development and thus need a
| really compelling reason to be replaced.
|
| SICP occupies an interesting place in this space:
| computer programs definitely had quite a bit of
| development, but Abelson and Sussman are amazing and
| their perspective remains valuable.
|
| Haven't seen that computer architecture course, you seem
| to suggest it may be another of this kind?
| PennRobotics wrote:
| There is a newer SICP (2004) at https://www.youtube.com/p
| laylist?list=PL7BcsI5ueSNFPCEisbaoQ...
|
| The architecture course is 6.004, although it is a bit
| different than Abelson/Sussman. Abelson focuses heavily
| on software concepts while 6.004 has a strong hardware
| bent.
| gjvc wrote:
| Hal Abelson was also one of the leaders of the MIT OCW
| initiative. (source
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8k8o7zkA1o)
| bnajdecki wrote:
| Now, I know what I'll be doing during summer :D
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| A flawed but wonderful resource. Reminds me of the early days of
| film, before directors understood that film was its own thing
| with its own affordances, not recorded theater
|
| Still great, though. The format may be ill-fitted to the medium,
| but any content from people of Strang's human caliber is a rare
| treat
| ghaff wrote:
| OCW is really a mix of different things. It was originally
| pitched as bundles of resources that teachers could use to
| assemble courses based on an MIT curriculum. Pre-MOOC (and pre-
| ubiquitous video), it was not really intended to be packaged
| courses for a student to use directly. There were doubtless
| some political reasons for the original positioning, but in any
| case it means OCW courses are a bit of a mixed bag depending
| upon what someone is looking for.
| TobySKT wrote:
| Learn how to build a telemedicine app by looking at the market,
| development process, examples, challenges, and costs
| https://steelkiwi.com/blog/how-to-build-a-doctor-on-demand-a...
| forinti wrote:
| It is just a fantastic opportunity to watch Prof. Gilbert
| Strang's lectures.
|
| I just wish I had had access to this when I was in college.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| Let me start by saying I love OCW. It allows a connection to
| MIT far beyond simply donating money each year. As an alum of
| MIT, I find it interesting that the OCW video lectures are
| generally much better than what I recall the actual classes to
| be. I am not sure if this is because some classes had multiple
| instructors and only the best are presented on OCW and/or the
| Professors and students are especially good for OCW because
| they know they are being recorded.
| Hadriel wrote:
| How has this evolved over the years?
| ghaff wrote:
| The main thing is that, in many cases, it's evolved from mostly
| being whatever raw materials (syllabus, lecture notes, pointers
| to resources like textbooks) could be pulled together to often
| being closer to a course in a box more akin to a MOOC.
|
| As I mentioned in another comment it was originally pitched as
| a resource for would be teachers rather than for students
| directly.
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(page generated 2021-07-09 23:02 UTC)