Solid Geekery

MIT OpenCourseWare

Have you ever wanted to attend a prestigious school like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?  You could start studying now, take the entrance exams, and hope you get through the admission process.  Then you could spend four years of hard studying, mostly in classes that don’t really interest you.  Finally after all that grueling work, you could walk up on stage and receive your degree only to realize the crushing amounts of debt that you had to take on over those four years.

You could also get all that wonderful education for free.  So what’s the catch?  You have to do all the work on your own.  MIT has created a website they call OpenCourseWare where you can download information about all their courses.  A quick sampling of the site shows that you can get information from just about every department in the university including engineering, health sciences, and the Sloan School of Management.

Course Information

I decided to check out the information for a course that I took in college that wasn’t really one of my favorites but I figured would be a good test to see much information is available.  Under the courses for computer science is a course called Introduction to Algorithms.  Looking through that course, I found PDF documents of lecture notes, audio files, and even homework assignments.  Basically everything that was handed out or shown in class is available through the web site, and the course seemed to be very well done.

The lectures had very good presentation with step-by-step walkthroughs of all the algorithms.  The only problem I can see is that answers to assignments are not available, so this could be a problem if you’re doing all the work that a student in the class would be responsible for.  The course outline does however give you a good indication of all the expected readings, and it would be possible to learn a good bit about the topic of the class.

I think that it’s wonderful to have all this information available for free through their web site.  For people who are self-motivated and willing to spend a little bit of time, it’s a great way to learn about whatever areas might interest them.  It also gives me an excuse to throw out all those old binders of notes from my college classes, because I can just look up the course notes from a similar course and chances are it will be more legible than whatever I scratched down in my notes.