

On Open Education - josefperezcr
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/05/14/how-the-internet-is-revolutionizing-education/
I have found valuable resources on Open Education, some on the url, but also not so valuable.  -Your opinion?
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ansy
Throwing up slides and recorded lectures is one thing. But most of these
courses require you to buy the appropriate textbook which, while cheaper than
tuition, isn't exactly a low barrier to entry. You really can't can't replace
a college course with an audiobook. You need problem sets and reference
materials, too. If there's a programming assignment sometimes tools and sample
code are provided in the lab environment, but the open course version
typically just puts up a scan of the handout. There are exceptions, but
complete online courses is certainly not the rule in my experience.

Khan Academy has a nice web app that auto generates solvable problems for
various subjects. But even those kind of lack the quality of regular problem
sets. For most of the subjects I tried you just get the same problem over and
over again with different constants until you switch subjects.

Basically it's nice that all these universities are making lectures available.
But open textbooks and problem sets are really what's needed next in my
opinion.

Also, it would be nice if there was a Wikipedia of course material where
editors could construct a course out of the best pieces from all of these
university sites. Especially considering so many are piecemeal as is.

~~~
tokenadult
_Khan Academy has a nice web app that auto generates solvable problems for
various subjects. But even those kind of lack the quality of regular problem
sets._

Yes. I am sure this is something that the Khan Academy people expect to be
working on for quite a few years, building better sets of problems that are
amenable to online scoring. One current attempt at that (which works better
than Khan Academy, in my opinion) is ALEKS.

<http://www.aleks.com/>

See an earlier HN comment in another thread

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515796>

for quotations from mathematicians about the distinction between exercises and
problems in learning mathematics.

As for your thought about a "Wikipedia of course material," there is already
Wikibooks,

<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page>

but it is the backwater of Wikimedia Foundation projects (often becoming a
hang-out for editors banned from other Wikimedia Foundation projects) and has
few active editors. It's tough to get good-quality academic work out of unpaid
volunteers.

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editors#Chapter_Three:_The_future_.282007-present.29)

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magnitude
The problem with open education is that unless you are using it for self
fulfillment or self-driven applications, the general public does not recognize
or appreciate the learner's efforts. For example, I am considering to go back
to school for a graduate degree but I have all of the courses that I want to
take available for free online. Heck, there is even other non-university
affiliated material on the web like free ebooks that I am really interested in
studying. But the problem is no future employer will recognize my studies if I
go the free open route. If I spend the next two years self studying, saving
thousands of dollars in tuition and learning from the comfort of home, every
employer would look at it as wasted time. But if I spent the same exact time
commitment and had no part-time jobs but learned all of the material in an
institution then in the eyes of the employer I didn't waste time and I
productively went to school. This is annoying.

I guess what is needed is a free certification program that corresponds with
the open education movement. But I don't want a certification program that
looks cheap. I want certification that is prestigious and representative of my
intelligence and hard efforts, just like as if I was to get a graduate degree
from stanford.

~~~
dvse
One way to demonstrate your knowledge in a technical field like engineering or
computer science would be to publish some research papers in well known
journals or conferences. By no means perfect but much better than nothing.

This is not to say that some new form of certification is not needed as well.

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Wilduck
This is an interesting list of online learning resources, but I'd really like
to see some objective measurement of the success of these programs. Are there
any studies about:

A) The effectiveness of online versus traditional education?

B) The best ways to go about learning/teaching online?

