Global Teaching
by Tim Shier
Traditionally universities have tended to keep their lectured intellectual property very close to their chests and sharing hasn’t been one of their strong points. Recent developments seem to be changing that – which is GREAT news for everybody.
Yesterday I received an email from Riaan regarding another university,Berkley, which is using its own YouTube channel to upload lecture videos and other teaching material - Awesome.
While this is very novel and I applaud them for this bold step, it pales when compared to MIT’s juggernaut of online material.
In 2001 MIT created OpenCourseware and literally opened its doors (or is it servers) and offered anybody the opportunity to not only download their course notes but also the lectures in video and audio formats.
Over the past six years they have nurtured this encyclopedia of teaching material into over 1700 courses ranging from the relatively mainstream “English Literature – Shakespeare” through to the positively unintelligible “Mathematics - Infinite Random Matrix Theory”.
The role of universities as the primary means of gaining an education is quickly becoming, for lack of a better phrase, old school. (And with that the Internet makes another notch on its belt)
With such a large proportion of the international community lacking a formal education but with some level of Internet access these initiatives are excellent in assisting 3rd world countries to glean much needed knowledge from those in the know.
In particular I can’t help but noticing that information travels slowly into Africa, unfortunately I see that only 6% of the users are African (but about 40% of the users are in the developing world). I can only hope that improvements in African online infrastructure will see dramatic (and relatively speaking, low cost) improvements to the base level of education.
In the words of Susan Hockfield (in the MIT’s President Message) “OCW [OpenCourseware] expresses in an immediate and far-reaching way MIT's goal of advancing education around the world”.
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