The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142730   Message #3291964
Posted By: JohnInKansas
18-Jan-12 - 02:31 AM
Thread Name: MIT: course on women & folk music
Subject: RE: MIT: course on women & folk music
The MIT Open Courseware offering has been available for quite some time. I have been rather disappointed that what's up for most of the subjects offered, that I've looked at, consist mostly of "slide shows" (@$#& PowerPoint) that are (sometimes) a useful adjunct to a good lecture or class interactions at a seminar; but the lectures/discussions usually were omitted.

What's available for viewing and download is, of course, largely up to the individual prof in charge of the course, so there is some variation. The web pitches are largely outlines for seminars and/or class lectures, but don't provide the "interaction" expected from a live attendance and hence require a lot of work to even begin to approximate the real thing. (That may have changed some since my last look, of course.)

Similar open course offerings are to be found from a number of universities, with (IIRC) Yale and I believe Cal Tech being schools (along with MIT) who first began offering some. It has been a while since I took a look at any of them, so my recollection is a little hazy.

I seem to remember that the "home pages" for the MIT courses included some history of the open course concept, and/or identified the "consortium" of schools participating, either of which would give some description of other schools with similar stuff where you might be interested in looking. Maybe a couple of gups (Go-Ups) from the link posted would find information of that sort, assuming it's still there.

John