Last week we highlighted MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), the group posting all the university’s courses online – from lecture videos to exams – and offering them for free to anyone across the globe. This week we wanted to take a look at an example of one of the courses. OCW was spearheaded by MIT professor Harold Abelson who, among other achievements like founding Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, has received awards for teaching introductory computer science. So, we figured we would take a look at this free course, aimed at MIT students who have “little or no prior programming experience.”
The latest ugrad Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course on OCW is taught by professors Eric Grimson and John Guttag from back in the Fall of 2008. It includes everything from syllabus to exams and solutions, video lectures from the MIT professors, assignments (without solutions), and even the ability to ask questions to other people taking the course in an online study group. If you’re not going to have access to Internet, you can even download the course in full to your computer .
Each video lecture is two hours long (twenty-four in all) and is accompanied by a summary of the overarching topics covered, a transcript, and the full text of all the readings from the course book. Homework assignments and quizzes (“open book”) and exams follow the lectures. Here’s an example video lecture from Intro to CS:
One of the greatest things about OCW is that they are leveraging a new e-learning solution funded by the National Science Foundation called OpenStudy. OpenStudy allows OCW to create online study groups around each online course.
I signed up for emails, and it is a relatively active group from across the world asking questions about aspects of the course with others in the community collectively contributing answers. One question was, “Is python [the language used in the course] a good language to start with when learning CS?” Three people had contributed a list of about ten reasons why it was a good. An OpenStudy widget with scrolling questions also lives in the sidebar on the main course page, which also encourages you to join the study group.
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