

MIT Level Introductory Physics - Free Online Course Starts March 1st - MIT_Mechanics
http://relate.mit.edu/physicscourse

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epenn
There seems to be a theme of duplicate, potentially competing efforts coming
from the same universities in the now emerging online course space. First with
Coursera vs Udacity coming out of Stanford. Now with MITx vs RELATE coming out
of MIT. Wouldn't it make more sense for those within the same university to
collaborate in order to produce a consistent brand and user experience? Don't
get me wrong, I'm loving the fact that these types of educational systems are
beginning to take off. I'll be enrolling in as many as time permits. But
individual course content aside, it seems like each is reinventing each
other's wheel.

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SiVal
When movie technology first came out, movie makers used it to film plays. I'm
glad they didn't take the approach that they should find the best stage
performance of each play, film each one, and turn the collection into the
standard movie library, and stop there. Fortunately, they soon discovered that
movies didn't have to be limited by the constraints on plays.

So many aspects of college-level courses are bound to the institutional needs
of colleges. Courses must be taught to several people simultaneously and in
sync, must be delivered in semester/quarter/term-long chunks, must be popular
enough to support ongoing employment of local faculty & staff, must be taught
in a way that allows for objective grading (so, for example, emphasize grammar
rules over pronunciation in foreign language, regardless of actual relative
importance, because grammar is easier to score "objectively"),and so on.

Right now, these online courses are still basically movies filming plays.
These classroom "plays" are the way they are, because that serves the needs of
the institutions producing them.

But the most effective way to learn something personally useful probably isn't
going to coincide with maximizing an old institution's needs for prestige,
profits, politics, and power. I'd like to see these monolithic "degree
credentials" broken down to finer-grained "skill credentials" that are
available a la carte from competing sources that optimize their approach
differently for each specific skill and for learners with different
circumstances, with the learning results validated by independent agencies
that only care how much you know, not how you learned it, where you learned
it, or how long it took.

The last thing I want is a continuation of the "consistent brand and user
experience" of today's universities.

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3pt14159
Anyone interested in learning basically all of physics should pick up
Feynman's series on it. It is beautiful and teaches math and critical thinking
at the same time.

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georgekv
Is this a book or video series? I'd be interested if you could provide a link
to the series you mention specifically.

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gammarator
It's a series of textbooks [1] based on lectures Feynman gave while teaching
the introductory physics sequence at Caltech.

To my knowledge, no universities actually use the Feynman Lectures as a
textbook for their introductory courses. However, some students who have
already taken physics read the Feynman Lectures later and (self-)report a much
clearer understanding.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics)

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inconditus
UC Berkeley uses the books for their course. I'm not sure which specific class
though.

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gammarator
I was a Physics PhD student at Berkeley and taught intro physics; none of the
classes used Feynman as a primary text to my knowledge.

~~~
inconditus
Perhaps they just started now, Physics h7B requires it.
<http://ninjacourses.com/explore/course/2433/#books>

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dlo
The Web page you linked to lists it as a "recommended" text, which means it is
indeed not the primary text. The required text is Purcell.

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nutjob123
I don't like the subject selection for their first course. I think that the
benefit of freshman physics isn't necessarily learning classical mechanics
(F=MA, FBD's, kinematics, ect.) but teaching students to connect analytical
thinking with mathematics and giving them a strong start for a science or
engineering curriculum. I am not against learning for the sake of learning but
I don't see how this would be useful to anyone who wasn't going to take more
science or engineering classes, in which case they would have to re-take a
physics course for real credit. I guess that I am less thrilled by their
subject selection because the free cs courses already available online are
useful and teach easily applied concepts but introductory physics just warms
students up to begin working on a full B.S. degree.

~~~
cop359
Physics education is extremely baroque. There is a set way of teaching which
has been done for the past 50 years and nothing is going to change it
unfortunately.

Everyone learns from the same exact textbooks. My professors were using the
same exact edition of Kleppner and Kolenkow (Into Classical Mechanics)
textbook I used. It's even a point of pride for them. The canonical set of
books are:

K&R -> Intro Mechanics

Taylor -> Advanced Mechanics

Griffiths -> E&M and Quantum

Sakurai -> Quantum

Boas -> Mathematical methods

(I'm prolly missing a few)

Every physics student in the US is familiar with these books.

Part of the reason for the intransigence is that it weeds out the weaklings.
They make Physics very difficult and impenetrable in part so that 1/2 the
class drops out and goes to do Bio or CS(which are taught sooo much better)
and you're left with the most hard working masochistic students of whom the
top 10% will become grad students and slave away for minimum pay for 7 years.

I mean.. they're not actively planning this in an evil-planning-room, but
that's the end results and the physics establishment is happy and no one is
pushing for new methods of teaching.

~~~
cypherpunks2
There are better books out there.

Advanced Mechanics: UPGRADE: Sussman and Wisdom

Basic Quantum: UPGRADE: Wichmann

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kibaekr
I wonder if MIT will offer free web development courses. I know Harvard's
David Malan offers free online courses (academicearth), but it's mainly PHP.
It'd be nice to have a legit Ruby on Rails course.

~~~
jeremyis
Unfortunately, not sure if this would happen through MITx. The standard MIT
curriculum doesn't have a Ruby on Rails course. It has project classes in
which you could choose to develop with Rails, but courses don't really teach
languages, save the few intro ones. 6.001 (no longer running) taught Scheme, I
_believe_ 6.01 teaches Python, 6.170 "reviewed" Java in 2 courses.

I think courses avoid specific technologies to focus on the concepts behind
them.

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nsr
The current implementation of 6.170 is "build a webapp in python". I seem to
recall that they were using Flask, but that might have changed as this is
pretty new.

6.00 is a class on programming in python. There are IAP (January) classes on
C++, python, and a few more.

Other than that, though, it's all in the context of "do a project with
language x" and not "learn language x."

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tar
Things like this make me excited about the future.

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karpathy
Just to clarify, "Both course and our research are separate from OCW or MITx."

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colinsidoti
Holy hell, can't they charge everyone $10 to help cover my tuition?

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colinsidoti
While I understand why this was downvoted, you must get how it's frustrating
to see tuition rising every year while great potential revenue streams are
being ignored. I'm still wondering what they're doing with dividends from Bose
:/

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lwat
Well personally I believe that the primary goal of universities is educating
people - the more the better. Charging for these will work against that.

