DeviceGuru via Slashdot reports that Stanford University has started offering Computer Science and Robotics courses under a copyleft licence (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License), as part of their Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) programme. This follows in the steps of, for example, MIT OpenCourseWare by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Stanford launched its programme independently, while MIT is part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a movement that groups over 200 higher education institutions in the world.
Stanford rationale for offering courses free of charge is that research and teaching transfer is an important part of their mission, and that the SEE is an important step in making this possible. The materials include lecture videos, transcripts and course handouts.
MIT offers 1800 courses covering all subjects from Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Arts. Susan Hockfield, President of MIT, explains the decision behind OpenCourseWare as ‘MIT faculty are passionate about their teaching, and they are keen to see their work benefit global society’. With an estimated cost of $10,000 to $15,000 per published course, this shows how seriously committed MIT are.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that top Universities have started offering their teaching materials for free on the Internet. In fact, it seems historically inexorable and necessary. In our Western societies with mandatory schooling until the age of 14 or 16, graduate students well in their 30s, and continuing education, it is easy to forget that ‘By 1424, Cambridge University library owned only 122 books—each of which had a value equal to a farm or vineyard’. It was largely thanks to Gutenberg’s printing press (ca. 1439) that knowledge became available to the wider society, not to talk about enabling the scientific revolution.
While cynics may argue that one goes to University for a degree, not an education (and a degree is precisely what open courses do not provide), the value of widely available high-quality teaching materials is hard to dispute. And not only for countries with worse access to education, or families who cannot afford college, but also for scientists struggling to keep up with new methods, techniques and results being produced at an ever faster pace.
Thus, open courses may be just another symptom of a social revolution that requires better sharing of knowledge, be it under the name of free or open source, open development, copyleft, open access or open standards.
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