Bug? That's not a bug, that's a feature.

Let’s be truly open.

Posted: April 3rd, 2009 | Author: bvgiarro | Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Today, I saw in my google reader that Standford is offering its iPhone development class for free on iTunesU. Anyone can log on, follow along with the class, and learn how to program for free! So I logged on to iTunes, and found that many other colleges also offer their classes free.

I can take a Java class at Cornell, or a Machine learning class at MIT. The professors upload the homework assignments that they hand out in class, so the people following at home can do them. While you might not get “college credit” for the class, you get valuable knowledge from great professors.

Here is my challenge to the College of Charleston and the Computer Science department specifically. Step up with the big boys like MIT, Stanford, and Duke. Before I graduate in 2010, I would love to see a College of Charleston Computer Science class offered for free on iTunes. I believe we have great professors at CofC, so let’s show them to the world.

5 Comments on “Let’s be truly open.”

  1. 1 Addison Ingle said at 5:51 pm on April 3rd, 2009:

    Great post. As part of your idea, isn’t one of the CS classrooms already set up for a remote broadcast, or at least high quality video recording for upload to youtube or itunes? Why not offer regular classes online? Web-CT or its successor can handle that now.

    How better to advertise the quality of learning in the department?

  2. 2 mccauleyc@cs.cofc.edu said at 10:09 am on April 6th, 2009:

    One of the classrooms is set up for high definition videoconferencing and local recording to DVD only. There’s currently no provision for upload to any online service. (though the DVD could certainly be ripped and converted at a later time for use on iTunes U, etc.)

  3. 3 septork@cs.cofc.edu said at 2:09 pm on April 6th, 2009:

    There will be an online course offered this summer, though it isn’t a broadcast.

    Great thoughts though – very interesting about the free courses! Nice challenge, Brian.

  4. 4 Aspen Olmsted said at 2:41 pm on April 12th, 2009:

    Sounds like COFC needs a course in open source. You are confusing free as in beer where open source means free as in speech.

    If you want to free as in beer then you may want to volunteer yourself in the future instead of others

  5. 5 Chris Starr said at 9:22 pm on April 20th, 2009:

    This is one of the best posts because it made me think harder. Thank you.

    Let’s see…

    Having a few lectures or a few courses online is a great marketing idea and maybe a great service to humanity too. Thus I agree. The CS faculty should make its mark!

    Now for a segue because I’d rather go meta, a natural inclination for a computer scientist, and consider for a moment the effect of extreme proliferation of online courseware.

    What if all courses for a computer science program were online and free for access? Let’s don’t stop there, what if all programs at all universities were online and even in Spanish too? Then what would that mean? What would happen to society (putting aside arguments related to IP and just desserts)?

    Would everyone get a college education? Would there eventually be so many people holding bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in computer science, art, history and the like that there would be no cooks, firemen or day laborers? Would society crumble under its on intellectual weight?

    I’m not worried. We cannot even get 50% of the high school students in SC to finish a diploma, even with required attendance. Let’s assume, however, that college-bound students are different. Maybe they would prefer to stay at home and be self-taught using the online courseware. Free. Why not?

    After seeing a few CS lectures from Stanford, I too believe that CS@CofC faculty are equally prepared to deliver engaging online lectures, maybe even more so. What I don’t see, at least in the Stanford CS recordings that I’ve viewed, are professors who call their undergraduate students by name during class. I don’t see them in their offices working with students on a project, debugging a problem, or even asking about how the family is doing. I did not see undergraduates engaged in research projects or building a resume with a faculty mentor for an internship application. I do not see computer science and faculty members playing together on a soccer team or in a wind ensemble. Where was the SciFi movie club, the ACM meeting, and the chats in the hallway or at lunch together?

    College is more than lectures. Much more (and I know you know that – remember this is meta). The tapestry of academic life weaves the interactions of many people together in engaging ways; ways that cannot yet be captured and streamed. With the Internet the facts come easily, but it takes an academic village to forge the stories of an educated mind.

    Great idea to make a mark for CS@CofC using iTunes/YouTube. But maybe we are already making that mark.

    I am proud to have you as a Discovery Informatics student at the College of Charleston. Stanford should be so fortunate.

    Reference
    A sample lecture on which I base some of my comments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi6L9lfbyyQ

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