MIT and Internet Usage - Essay Example

Discussion 2 MIT Open Ware Materials A Paper Presented to ‘Insert In Partial Fulfillment for the Insert of Course Presented by Insert your name Spring 2011 Introduction In 1999, MIT faculty considered how to use the internet in pursuit of MITs mission—to advance knowledge and educate students—and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site. Opportunities Most likely, MIT chose to create MIT OCW to draw more candidates to the school and to keep previous students and alumni skills sharp. MIT student are known for being smart top of the line candidates for corporate America. Knowledge is very important and there are so many benefits of the site. The top five favorites are the following 1).Those who do not want to register for school can peruse the site and learn applicable information to utilize in the job force.2). Professors and educators alike can utilize the information to shadow classes or lectures they may have to teach, financially it does not cost because there is no registration fee. 3) There are no prerequisites to use MIT Open Course Ware materials. MIT OCW is not a distance learning, credit bearing or degree granting initiative; there are no prerequisites to use MIT OCW materials. 4) You do not have to speak English. MIT OCW materials translate into non English languages. However, any MIT OCW materials translated into other languages from the original English must be accompanied by the MIT disclaimer regarding the materials. 5) Downloadable video files are available to save to disk or hard drive. Some of the videos are available on YouTube in flash streaming format and links to the videos are on iTunesU which requires an Apple’s free iTunes application. Students and professors alike both benefit from the site. However, those who do not benefit are from the site are those who may want to utilize the information as an accredited learning experience and may not list it as such when applying for employment opportunities. They publish 50 new courses every year and update 100 older courses with new materials every year so that the individual can check back for updates. That is what this site does to the general body of knowledge represented in the courses taught by MIT. Even though all of the course materials for MIT Sloan courses are free to everyone on line, they should one want to attend Sloan because it is a prestigious type educational experience; one that does not have to cease but the success can progress over time. Discussion MIT Open Course Ware is free and requires no registration. It is good for high school students and educators because you can browse by department or check highlights for high school. MIT Open Course Ware (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. OCW is a publication of the course materials that support the dynamic classroom interactions of an MIT education; it is not a degree granting or credit bearing initiative. You as the individual have the opportunity of working at your own pace. To find out what courses are available, a site overview is available for MIT Open Course Ware. The individuals also have the option of browsing courses by department by utilizing the advance search to locate a specific course or topic. The benefit of this is that there is no registration or enrolment process because OCW is not a credit bearing or degree granting initiative. However, each course published requires an investment of $10,000 to 15,000 to compile course materials from faculty in order to ensure proper licensing from open sharing and format materials for global distribution bottom line you have the ability to receive free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MOT with no registration or costs. Video MIT OpenCourseWare is a course ware of MIT course materials. There is no registration for the site and all materials are free to use. Courses are taught on courseware after they have been taught at MIT. The individual will find courses that were taught ten years ago are just as relevant today as courses that have been taught recently. The icons on the course list indicate some of the resources in the course, such as, exams with solutions or image galleries. The images in these courses show educators how they may teach similar topics; it’s like an online class with syllabus text number of lectures, homework assignments and test, how many times the course met each week and what was covered each session. MIT students use the site to review their workload or review concepts they learned previous semesters. Independent learners can brush up on skills or tackle new subjects with the video lectures. Many courses contain exams and solutions so that you can practice what you’ve learned. Courses can be downloaded for off line use by saving the links to your computer and extracting the contents. It is all the same material that is seen online except without the video and audio files to keep the file from getting too large. You can download those files from the partners’ sites such as ITunes U. All audio and video are kept in one list on the site with over one million viewers per month. They cannot answer all questions regarding the site and they are not able to connect you directly to the MIT faculty, but a lot of questions may be answered in the help section. They publish 50 new courses every year and update 100 older courses with new materials every year so that the individual can check back for updates. Many of MIT (OCW) course lists are available as RSS feeds. You can subscribe to these feeds and get an alert whenever they publish new content in the areas that interest you. The monthly newsletter contains a list of recently published courses alerts about site features and stories about how the site contents are used by people around the world. Open Course Ware is free to use however, they rely on public donations to support the publication. References Websites MIT Open Course Ware video http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/  OCW site http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm YouTube MIT OpenCourseWare Site Tour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICa_4xUr8BA&feature=player_embedded Read More