MIT OpenCourseWare publishes Linear Algebra in innovative OCW Scholar format
One of OCW’s most popular courses, Linear Algebra, is now available in a version designed to support independent learning.
CAMBRIDGE, MA, January 24, 2012 – MIT’s OpenCourseWare has released a new version of Linear Algebra, one of its most visited courses, in the innovative OCW Scholar format designed for independent learners. Taught by Professor Gilbert Strang, 18.06SC Linear Algebra addresses systems of linear equations and the properties of matrices. The concepts of linear algebra are used to solve problems in physics, economics, engineering, and other disciplines. 18.06SC is the first of six OCW Scholar courses planned for release by the end of February.
Linear Algebra was one of the original 50 courses published on the MIT OpenCourseWare proof-of-concept site launched in 2002. Over the past ten years this course has received a total of 3.1 million visits from educators and learners around the world. Professor Strang, who is one of the most widely known mathematicians in the world, hopes that the new, robust version—with its problem solving videos—will help students everywhere.
“I’m very proud of this new version of 18.06,” said Professor Strang. “OCW has reached out to millions of educators and learners around the globe. With this new approach, even more people can see the beauty and usefulness of Linear Algebra.” In September, Strang was named the first MathWorks Professor of Mathematics, assuming a professorship recently endowed by MathWorks, the maker of mathematical software.
OCW Scholar courses represent a new approach to OCW publication. MIT professors and students work closely with the OCW team to restructure the learning experience for independent learners, who typically have few additional resources available to them. The courses offer more materials than typical OCW courses and include new custom-created content. The OCW Scholar version of Linear Algebra includes videos of all the course lectures supplemented by lecture summaries and by 36 short videos showing how to solve specific problems.
The first five of a planned twenty OCW Scholar courses were launched by MIT OpenCourseWare in January 2011, and have collectively received more than 800,000 visits in less than a year. The initial OCW Scholar courses included Classical Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, Solid State Chemistry, Single Variable Calculus, and Multivariable Calculus. Linear Algebra is the first of seven OCW Scholar courses that will be published in 2012. Other upcoming OCW Scholar courses include Principles of Microeconomics, Differential Equations, Introduction to Psychology, Fundamentals of Biology, Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. OCW Scholar courses are published on the OCW site with the support of the Stanton Foundation.
About MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of substantially all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,100 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 1.75 million web site visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 100 million individuals have accessed OCW materials. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by donations from site visitors, grants and corporate sponsorship.
About Gilbert Strang
Gilbert Strang attended MIT as an undergraduate and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA, and since then he has taught at MIT. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics at MIT and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, and has published eight textbooks. He was the President of SIAM during 1999 and 2000, and Chair of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics. He has received numerous awards and prizes, including the von Neumann Medal, the Henrici Prize, first Su Buchin Prize, and the Haimo Prize.
About the Stanton Foundation
The Stanton Foundation was created by Frank Stanton, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest executives in the history of electronic communications. During his 25 years as president of CBS, he turned a lesser-known radio network into a broadcasting powerhouse. Stanton made many historic contributions to the industry and to the society it served. In 1960, he initiated the first televised presidential debates—the famous Nixon-Kennedy “Great Debates”—which required a special Act of Congress before they could proceed. He also spearheaded the creation of the first coast-to-coast broadcasting system, allowing CBS to become the first network to present a news event live across the continental United States, a speech by President Truman at the opening of the Japanese Peace Conference in San Francisco. Frank Stanton was the commencement speaker at MIT in 1961.
Contact:
Stephen Carson
External Relations Director
MIT OpenCourseWare
617-253-1250
MIT OpenCourseWare 2011 year-end numbers
Another good year for MIT OpenCourseWare. Big story here is the tremendous jump in YouTube numbers–this plus the 12 million iTunes U downloads and the redistribution we are getting through Chinese sites like 163.com (which we get no reporting from) means that a lot of the OCW activity is through our video redistribution.
• 18.6 million visits (+1.2 million over last year) 10.2 million repeat visits, 8.4 million new visits
• 9.8 million visitors (+200K)
• 1.92 visits per visitor (+0.10)
• 101.4 million page views (+3.1 million)
• 5.42 pages per visit (-0.21)
• 1.8 M zip files of course content downloaded (-.1 million)
• 11.4 million YouTube views (+4.1 million)
• 12 million iTunes downloads (+0.2 million)
• 317K visits from the MIT community (+42K)
• 361K visits referred by StumbleUpon (-85K); 183K by EducationPortal (+23K); 178K by Facebook (+100K); 157K by Reddit (-15K); 117K by Wikipedia (+5K); 111K by YouTube (+16K)
• 33% of visitors used Firefox (-5%); 26% used Chrome (+11%); 23% used IE (-11%); 14% used Safari (+4%)
• 2.37% used iOS (+1.57)
Stanford courses and college admissions
I heard the other day that participation in the Stanford AI course stands at about 20,000 out of the initial 160,000. Not far off participation trends in online learning generally and very impressive for a free offering. And still a very big number.
What intrigues me is that this may offer even elite schools the opportunity to have some form of open enrollment option. Instead of having to guess which 5% of applicants are most likely to succeed, schools can offer a set of qualifying courses in a similar format to all comers and accept the most successful.
This truly would have a democratizing effect on higher education. I’m sure the system would have its own biases, but at least theoretically, anyone would have a chance to get in based on actual performance. And even a very small fee would likely generate enough revenue to more than cover cost.
OpenFiction challenge #1 now up on P2PU
I’ve gone and done it. Structured the first P2PU challenge for the OpenFiction Project content. I’m not 100% sure how well it works, but I guess the best way to find out is to put it up and see what happens. Now, to figure out how to attach a badge…
Puttin’ the “fiction” back in “OpenFiction”
It’s been too long since I’ve written anything in this space about fiction in general, and the OpenFiction Project specifically. Events however conspire to bring both back to the fore. But first, a detour into advisory work. One of the real pleasures of my job is that I am asked quite often to provide advice to other open projects, a pay-it-forward activity that pays dividends back to me and MIT OpenCourseWare by helping us keep in touch with the latest developments in open education.
I’ve accepted a few requests to participate in advisory boards for projects, a larger commitment that I try to take on only as I have sufficient time and strong interest in the program. One of the projects I’ve advised for a while is Peer-to-Peer University, and it’s been a pleasure to watch that community develop over time (though I’m not sure my advising has had much to do with it). P2PU is a really innovative online learning community that has recently developed a new approach to supporting scalable learning based on challenges and badges. More at another time on how these work (or visit the P2PU blog for more information).
In discussions with (mostly) Philipp Schmidt, a co-founder of P2PU and fellow OCW Consortium board member, I realized that the challenges model they’d developed for HTML programming might also work very nicely for the OpenFiction Project courseware. I’d been meaning to do a little pruning on tOFP content for a while anyway, so I took the opportunity to do so, and then created a challenge for the first part of tOFP content on the P2PU site.
I’m not 100% sold on the way it is working together so far. I have tried in tOFP content to preserve as much of the original language and pedagogy of the online course from which the materials were taken as possible, and that language refers to craftbooks, bulletin boards and other features that were a part of the course structure, but are not part of the current site structure or the challenge structure. To work effectively with the materials in the P2PU context, users will have to understand the historicity of materials and how to use the P2PU features with the content. The alternative is to undertake a significant redraft of the content, tailoring it specifically to the P2PU format, something I might consider if the model seems to work.
Also, I’ve been asked recently to join the advisory board of Writing Commons, and this seems to coincide well with the above developments. I’m going to be writing a piece on tOFP and the above experiment for that site, which will give a better idea of how the P2PU/tOFP combination works. I will throw that up here as well.
Seems like the only thing not going on in my writing world is actual writing…
Lies, damn lies and…
…new statistics.
Just completed the 2011 evaluation summary. Hope as always to follow with a more detailed report, but for now, this gives a general idea of directions and trends.
Most interesting thing in here for me is the increase in % of students (up to 45% from 42%), making them now the largest constituency instead of self learners (at 42% down from 43%). These are margin-of-error-ish changes, but interesting nonetheless. Could be a result of the time of year we did the survey, could indicate more people returning to school in a tough economy–lots of possible explanations.
Also interesting that the primary student use is now complementing materials from an enrolled course (up to 45% from 39%) instead of learning outside the scope of formally enrolled coursework (down from 44% to 40%). This may indicate that more students are coming from undergraduate and community colleges, as this lines up more with past measures of usage scenarios at that level, but I’ll have to dig deeper to see if that holds.
Dig in yourself, and feel free to ask questions!
What if…?
One of the things that I learned recently at the Asia OpenCourseWare Conference was that a major newspaper in Taiwan that publishes US News & World Report-style college rankings has begun considering OpenCourseWare as part of its ranking formula–reportedly 5% of the total.
OCW publication is a more widespread practice in Korea than in the US. A government-sponsored site includes more than 1,000 courses from 127 institutions, and the Korea OCW Consortium includes 19 leading universities.
What would happen in the US, I wonder, if US News & WR suddenly began considering transparency and knowledge dissemination as embodied in OCW/OER projects as a part of its formula? I’m sure they are lobbied all the time for changes to the formula, but I think there is a pretty good case to be made here.
After all, schools sharing their educational content openly must be fairly confident it’s of good quality, and OCW certainly aids students in selecting a program that is not only of high quality, but also well suited to their learning styles and interests. Plus OCW/OER demonstrates a serious commitment by the institution in fulfilling its mission to disseminate knowledge and address global educational needs.
Any thoughts on how to start the campaign?
Asia rising in the OCW world
At the Asian OCW/Open Education Regional Conference (AROOC) 2011. It’s clear that Asia is moving into the fore of OCW publication. OCW in Asia is more widespread than anywhere else in the world, with 213 institutions sharing more than 3,500 courses.
Members of the Japan OCW Consortium and participants in the Korea OCW program have each published more than 1,000 courses each, and members of the Taiwan OCW Consortium have published around 450 courses, three quarters of which include video lectures.
Even more impressive is the way that these univerisites are beginning to leverage the open content they’ve created to reimagine how they provide campus-based education, experimenting with inverted classrooms, tuition reduction, and student generation of content.
This information is drawn from presentations that will be available via streaming media soon. I’ll post a link when I have it.
2012 Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence call for nominations
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the second annual Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE). The OCW ACE’s will be presented at the next global OpenCourseWare Consortium meeting in Cambridge, U.K., April 16-18, 2012.
The Awards or OpenCourseWare Excellence recognize outstanding individual contributions to the OCW/OER movement, exemplary OCW member sites and excellent individual course presentations. A panel of voting members will select ACE site and course winners from finalists culled by the award committee. Individual winners will be selected by a vote of the board of directors.
Nominations for individuals, sites and courses will be accepted through January 13, 2012 and may be submitted through the following page (http://ocwconsortium.org/ace) or by e-mailing ace@ocwconsortium.org. Nominations for sites and courses are encouraged to be submitted as two-minute video/screen capture tours of the relevant content. Visit the above web page for complete information on preliminary criteria, rules and eligibility.
The OCWC is seeking volunteers to serve on the ACE Committee to refine award criteria and select award finalists. The Consortium is also seeking a sponsor for the awards ceremony at the upcoming Consortium meeting.
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