【Popular Science】MIT For Free

深深的红

MIT For Free                                                                                                
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-08/home-schooled-free-online-university-classes

By Josh Dean                  Posted 08.12.2009 at 11:41 am

I was not screwing around. When I took the first physics class of mylife, at age 35, it was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,and my professor was Walter Lewin, one of that institution’s mostrespected instructors. Lewin is a man so comfortable with his vectorsthat he diagrams them in front of a classroom audience while wearingTeva sandals.

OK, I wasn’t really “at” MIT. And “took” the class may be a stretch.I was watching the video of one of Lewin’s lectures from the comfort ofmy backyard in Brooklyn, and I too was wearing sandals (but not Tevas;I have standards).


Lewin is the breakout star of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, whatthe school calls a “Web publication” of virtually every class taught inits hallowed halls. For his dynamic teaching and frequent stunts(building a human pendulum, firing golf balls at glass panels), he’sbeen downloaded by physics enthusiasts around the globe and profiled onthe front page of the New York Times as the first luminary of onlineopen learning. The professor’s fans are examples of a new type ofstudent participating in a new kind of education, one built around thevast library of free online courseware offered by many of the world’stemples of higher learning, as well as museums, nonprofit organizationsand other knowledgeable benevolents.

Why would someone who’s not paying $38,000 or getting a singlecredit subject themselves to the rigors of an MIT course? For onething, OCW offers elite teaching on demand. College students at lesserschools can use a teacher like Lewin to stretch themselves (32 percentof MIT’s OCW users are enrolled at another college). A high-schoolphysics teacher might tune in to brush up on the laws ofthermodynamics—or become a better teacher by studying different methodsof instruction. An engineer can beef up by taking tests from theadvanced-level classes to identify stuff he ought to know but doesn’tand then dive into course notes to learn them.

And then there’s the just plain curious, a category that wouldinclude me. I wondered: What’s an MIT course like, anyway? Could I,more than a decade out of school, hang with those young brainiacs? Tofind out, I dusted off my three-ring binder and re-enrolled in schoolpart-time from the comfort of my couch, drawing not just from MIT butfrom the many free sources online. Mimicking a typical course load, Iwould take a science course and a language course, attempt to cram in acomputer-programming course, and watch as many miscellaneous lecturesas I could stand. I wanted to see if I, in a month, operating as anadult balancing a semi-regular schedule and lots of other obligations,could actually learn something.

MIT for FreeThe idea behind MIT’s OpenCourseWare program was born in 2000 on therecommendation of a faculty committee convened to answer two questions:How is the Internet going to change education? And what is MIT going todo about it?

Steve Carson, a spokesman for OCW, which is now a full entity withinMIT with a $3.6-million budget, told me that the group was expected torecommend a for-profit distance-learning program. Once they startedthinking hard about such a model, however, it didn’t make sense.

The problem is that MIT is, by its very nature, an exclusiveinstitution, which accepts a mere 12 percent of its applicants andcharges a small fortune for the privilege of attending. To put ascaled-back version of that online, available to a much largeraudience, and still award credit would potentially devalue the existinguniversity. Instead, they decided to do the opposite: put everythingout there for free, but with no offer of credit or a degree. It wouldcost a lot of money, sure, but it would be great for the school’simage, and it would be a tremendous resource for actual MIT students—asCarson puts it, a “souped-up Wikipedia” for the MIT community to use.In the meantime, it would give the whole world the opportunity tosample an MIT education. Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of Japanese andlinguistics at MIT, was one of the key members of that committee. Hespeaks of the program with uncut idealism. “Why are we doing this?” hesays. “We’re doing this because of the belief that knowledge, when youshare it, expands.”

Boy does it. OCW went live as a pilot program in 2002 with 50 courses.Five years later, MIT celebrated the publishing of its 1,800th course,and today more than 250 schools around the world have similarprograms—many participating through the OCW Consortium, set up by MITto help other schools follow its example. MIT estimates that 56 millionpeople have accessed its courses alone, either directly from OCW orfrom its six translation sites. The 200-plus members of the OCWConsortium saw 15.7 million visits in the first quarter of this yearalone. Apple created iTunes U to distribute classes in audio and video.YouTube has a channel called YouTube EDU.


And there’s much more beyond MIT—sites like Academic Earth (aclearinghouse for lectures from scholars and intellectuals), GoogleCode University, and thousands of free or for-profit sites teachingeverything from Swedish to how to build and service solar cells. It’s arich, burbling, overwhelming world. You could easily tumble down thisrabbit hole and emerge weeks later, bearded, bleary-eyed and the mostannoying party guest of all time. Or you could find that you’re not assmart as you thought you were.

Reality Check“In physics we explore the very small to the very large,” Lewinsaid. He stood in front of the class in pleated khaki cargo pants and ablousy blue oxford and spoke with the sort of vague, undefined Europeanaccent that would make him an excellent foil for James Bond. (He turnsout to be Dutch.) Lewin dismissed the American system of measure as“extremely uncivilized” and said his class would be based on the metricsystem. Then he rolled the film “Powers of 10,” at which point myscreen went black and a note indicated that copyright prevented thefilm from being included.

Day one, and I’d already stumbled on an important limitation of theOCW experience. MIT (or any school) doesn’t have the right to give awaycopyrighted materials such as films or textbooks used in class. In thecase of the former, it’s often not much of an issue; I just went toYouTube and dialed up the slightly dated (and moderately psychedelic)1977 film made by Ray and Charles Eames to depict the relative size ofthings in the universe. But when it comes to books, it’s a stumblingblock.

I was operating under the misguided notion that I could survive thisexperiment using only what was completely free, so I chose not to clickthe amazon.com link to order the textbook. That turned out to be amajor problem. It quickly became clear that I was not equipped with thesame foundational basis in math or physics that the students in thisfirst-semester freshman physics course were, and without thesupplemental text, I had no additional tool for decoding Lewin’sscribbles. Obviously, I couldn’t ask a question, either.

I stuck with it, for a while. In a week, I watched three of Lewin’s50-minute lectures and understood almost none of them. The stunts forwhich he’s become famous are undeniably entertaining—I think it’s fairto call this prop-wielding genius the Gallagher of science—but at theend of each hour I’d look down at my scrawls and realize they wereuseless to me. They looked like hieroglyphics.

I got that long-dormant lost-in-class feeling that triggers notebookdoodles and clock watching, and I started to dread “going.” And so, ina departure lounge at Miami International Airport, around the timeLewin said, “We now come to a much more difficult part, and that ismultiplication of vectors,” I decided to drop the class.

Thank God for Flash CardsThe guilt I felt over my failure to absorb higher math was soonoffset by two things. First, I realized that unlike in college, therewas no consequence or embarrassment to dropping the class. No walk ofshame to the registrar’s office, and it’s not as if Lewin would missme. Two, I was getting more bilingual by the day.

After hunting for the perfect online language course, I’d settled ona Romanian class from BYKI (Before You Know It), a for-profit site witha broad selection of free options, including a boiled-down version ofits software that enables you to study vocabulary and basic grammarusing a program of downloadable pop-up flash cards. The idea is to hookyou and hope you’ll pay up to $70 for the full version, but what’s freeis substantial; plenty, it seemed, to crash-prepare for a trip. Iwasn’t actually going to Romania, I was simply curious about the tonguethat I’d recently learned is the fifth Romance language. In fact, Ihappened to have a trip scheduled to a place where Romanian would do meno good at all: Ecuador.

On day five, lying on the musty sheets of a hotel bed in Quito, Ilearned to count from one to 10 in Romanian in less than half an hourusing the program’s highly intuitive card system. It starts by havingyou read and repeat the words in English and Romanian and then has youtype the translation both ways. It’s self-correcting, and when you missa word, that word is given higher priority and appears more often untilyou’ve proven that you’ve learned it. It works. By the time I headedout for the night, I could transcribe a phone number in Romanian.

It turns out that this kind of itinerant self-schooling is prettycommon. MIT says 61 percent of OCW users live outside the U.S. (thelargest block is in East Asia, with 22 percent). Steve Carson sharedcase studies with me featuring students, educators and self-learnersfrom Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Nigeria and St. Lucia.

Take the story of two Bostonians, Ann Nguyen and Alison Cole.Recent college grads (Nguyen from the University ofMassachusetts–Amherst, Cole from Scotland’s Edinburgh NapierUniversity), the two decamped this summer to India, where they plan tolive cheaply for a few years while attempting a bold experiment. Nguyenand Cole saw in OCW’s freely available teachings the material for an“alternative grad school” of their own design. Theirs is the ultimatestudy-abroad program—self-imposed graduate-level distance learningconducted from a far-flung location that also happens to have plenty ofopportunities for hands-on work related to the subject of study,environmental engineering. Cole told me that she’s not sure how well itwill work but that the two want to answer a number of questions,foremost among them: Can a person conduct work with high academicintegrity outside the auspices of an institution?

“I’m an academic at heart,” Cole says. “But the realization thatcontinuing my education would only further my debt and reduce myability to afford life and a family really bummed me out.” She andNguyen are using the syllabi from MIT OCW’s courses in groundhydrology, soil behavior and aquatic chemistry to construct a programthat will study arid-land restoration, a subject that has practicalapplications in India and will also be relevant out there in job-landwhen it comes time to move back. (How employers will feel about thisself-governed education remains to be seen.)

Although Cole and Nguyen appear to be the first to attempt to useOCW as the basis for a full-blown graduate program, they’re hardly theonly hardcore autodidacts. Consider “Deevani,” who e-mailed me oneafternoon in response to a call for satisfied OCW students. Deevaniturned out to be A. Ines Rooney, a 34-year-old music-industry executivewho moonlights as a songwriter specializing in the Latin-inspiredhip-hop known as reggaeton. Rooney is self-taught in 12 languages,including Urdu, Bengali and Mandarin, and spends whatever spare timeshe has after producing and recording records (and raising herchildren) to devour OCW language, culture, literature, economics andfinance classes—some 80 of them so far, she estimates. “I think I havea Ph.D. right now,” she says, half-kidding. “I just don’t have thecredit.”

Rooney is right. You’ll never earn a degree from your self-imposedstudies. As Carson points out, no amalgam of text and video, no matterwho builds it, will ever be a substitute for an actual MIT education.(Or an education from Carnegie Mellon, or Notre Dame, or anywhereelse.) You can’t actually use the labs or interact with faculty, whoare the real draw of a college.

Like any open-source program, however, free Internet education isevolving. “There are Yahoo groups that have formed around MIT content,”Carson says. “If [independent learners] don’t need certification butneed content, they can go to OpenCourseWare and form a group.”

(Sort of) Living Up to My PotentialI could have used a support group. The second week of my experiment,a little shell-shocked by my failure in physics, I listened to threeMIT biology lectures. It didn’t stick. Next I sought out somethingscience-y that was both easier to handle and more practical. I optedfor a seminar taught by the chemist Patricia Christie, a lecturer inMIT’s Experiment Study Group. “Cooking,” read the course descriptionfor Kitchen Chemistry, “may be the oldest and most widespreadapplication of chemistry, and recipes may be the oldest practicalresult of chemical research.” It sounded perfect until I hit a snag:There were no video or audio lectures.

I wrote to Carson in a panic, and he broke the news to me. Only 79 ofthe OCW courses come with video lectures (another 22 come with audio).The program was intended as a print-based initiative; whether to addvideo was the professor’s call. In essence, mine would be a lab classwithout the labs. I bit into the curriculum anyway. The class on breadobliged me to investigate the science of yeast, thought to be theoldest industrial biological agent. My curiosity piqued, I spent anentire afternoon bouncing around the Web reading about baking science.

Yeast cells coming to life are biochemistry in action. I tested theprocess by making a yeast air balloon, just like the students in thereal class. I mixed yeast, sugar and water in a bottle and watched asthe carbon dioxide given off inflated a balloon affixed to the neck. Itwas amateur science, sure, but it was science. And in the end I gotsomething useful: some challah that my girlfriend, an aficionado oftoast, declared the best bread she’d had all year. I began to lookforward to each kitchen chemistry “class,” and by the last week of myexperiment I had made my pancakes fluffier, attempted my first stew andmy first pie, understood for the first time how baking soda works, andlearned what an emulsion is. I even made a soft, lemony cheese. In thekitchen, at least, I was an improved person thanks to self-directedstudy.

Romanian was also proving a success. By the final week of mymonth-long experiment, I could meet and greet people in a Bucharest ofmy imagination, bargain a cabbie from 10 lei to 5 (though if he argued,I’d be stuck), and identify 16 different animals, including an eagle(the word, oddly enough, is vultur).

My foray into computer science, on the other hand, was onlymoderately better than the physics debacle. I started with the grandambition of building an iPhone app, but the online Stanford Universitycourse I was considering required you to possess “C language andprogramming experience at the level of 106B or X.” I had no idea whatthese things meant, so I changed my mind. After spending two weeks ofmy “term” shopping for a new course (hey, no registration deadlinehere), I settled on trying to learn an old, elementary programminglanguage called Logo. As one Logo site declared: So simple a child cando it!

Or me. A message board led me to a Logo class built by a generousBritish man. I downloaded the simple software and in minutes hadmastered the first tutorial, which involved learning to direct a smallturtle around the screen using simple commands. I could make squares,triangles and combinations of the two. I could also use Logo tocomplete equations both simple (addition) and more complex(trigonometric functions). A few tutorials later, I was making theprogram speak. It wasn’t long, though, before terms like “data typesand values” and “flow control” crept into the syllabus and I feltmyself falling behind, wishing I could raise my hand and ask someone toexplain it to me. By the second or third lesson I was getting thedreads, and for days after I avoided it entirely, procrastinating byany means necessary, including Romanian.

My failure to keep up with even basic science courses told mesomething I already knew, which is that I’m a writer, not a scientistor programmer. And that leads me to the first of a few Free OnlineSchool Rules I’d learned by the end of my experiment:
1. You get what you pay for. “Free” means no asking questions in themiddle of class, which can be a dealbreaker with a subject aspotentially confusing as physics.
2. That said, it might help if you actually buy the textbook.
3. Free online learning is not going to teach you anything substantialovernight, or in a week (unless you are Rain Man, in which case you’rejust memorizing anyway). Plan to do a whole course.
4. There are few things better than hot bread made with your own twohands, especially when you understand the science of why it’s sodelicious.
5. We are at the beginning of this experiment, not the end.

“You know where we’re heading with this,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, whobelieves that OCW has enriched current students and faculty, enhancedMIT’s reputation as an institution at the forefront of innovation, andprovided an invaluable opportunity to show off its smarts to thoseprospective geniuses that top schools fight for. “You can already seeit. You”—here he means an institution—“can’t afford not to do OCW. Iforesee that in five years, all major institutions will be openingcourses to let the world see what they do. It’s a no-brainer, right?”

深深的红

这篇新闻与中国没有直接的关系。但是我觉得MIT的这个免费网络课程的项目很有意义。现在也已经有其他的高校加入进来了。我国虽然传统上尊师重教，但当前对于教育的投入还不是尽如人意。我以为AC作为一个交流的平台，一方面是揭露国外不是报道的窗口，另一方面也可以作为介绍国外先进经验的窗口。所以把这篇文章转过来了。另外，也有一些两岸三地的学者参与了把MIT网络课程汉化的工作。