MIT OpenCourseWare
ocw.mit.edu
ocw.mit.edu
While I did not learn much, in terms of actual syllabus, I did get exposed to a refreshing teaching style of exploratory learning.
It helped me learn how to learn, how to approach a subject or problem, how to be confident as a learner.
I have never looked back. Today, I am confident that I can learn any subject, with the right books and practice. That confidence helped me grow as an engineer in my job.
Even today, I view these courses and new ones all the time.
An added side effect was the opening up of learning resources from Stanford, Yale, etc.
A lot of computer science lectures in the CS & EE category. Don't remember the names of lecturers, but almost all of the lectures have a very good flow.
I remember walking into random rooms on Freenode from MIT (I think) and seeing well known people/professors in there. It was such an inspiration to keep learning.
Raised in the USA, I was extremely fortunate (so many students here and abroad miss out on the sheer good luck of getting several really great teachers in back-to-back succession in school) to have been exposed to some really amazing teachers early in life who taught this exact lesson. Their view of teaching was that if they taught students how to rely on rote book-learning without teaching an accompanying "thirst for knowledge" and the tools to gain that knowledge, then they'd failed at their job as teachers.
When these universities first started releasing so much of their courseware openly like this, I viewed it as one of the great triumphs of the modern Internet, and a huge boon for humanity. I am glad that humanity now has such an abundance of great learning materials available so readily, and saddened by how few humans choose to avail themselves of such opportunity.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
The link says 2005 but don't worry, it is 100% not from 2005, as the video production, hair styles, and general demeanor of people in the video will attest.
> These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. These videos are also available here under a Creative Commons license compatible with commercial use.
I've seen so many courses with newer course-dates but the lectures alone are from older editions of the same course.
What's kind of sad are the upper level/graduate courses with no lectures, or the ones that have lectures cut out for IP reasons.
If a course is teaching computer architecture and switches from a hypothetical instruction set to RISC-V, the core of the instruction hasn't changed---memory layout, instruction ordering, digital system concepts.
(The nice thing, Silvina Hanono Wachman uploads a privately recorded version of each semester of the computer architecture class, so we get the classic Chris Terman instruction as well as the modern variant.)
With that in mind, some classes will have a higher relevance churn rate than others and should be updated more often. Other classes might have historically had an amazing instructor and no major development and thus need a really compelling reason to be replaced. (MIT's Introductory Physics comes to mind.)
SICP occupies an interesting place in this space: computer programs definitely had quite a bit of development, but Abelson and Sussman are amazing and their perspective remains valuable.
Haven't seen that computer architecture course, you seem to suggest it may be another of this kind?
The architecture course is 6.004, although it is a bit different than Abelson/Sussman. Abelson focuses heavily on software concepts while 6.004 has a strong hardware bent.
The real value of a professor is that because they know the material they can see the gap in your knowledge, where you’re making the mistake, and quickly get you over the hurdle.
This is hard to do when learning by yourself because if you had the knowledge you wouldn’t have gotten stuck in the first place.
I wish there were better communities around learning. Discussion bards, forums, etc. have been terrible substitutes in my opinion for in-person learning. Often a big part of my learning comes from helping and discussing the problems with classmates. I’ve learned as much from my peers as I have from professors.
The advantage is that students get really comprehensive exposure to the material. First from a formal lecture and then from in-classroom attention with questions and practice. It's sort of like standard college lectures and recitations with TA's except there's more emphasis on the recitations and the lectures are from really excellent instructors.
I’d like to experience it. The model didn’t get started until after I finished college. I’ve done online classes, but they miss the in-person dialog component.
In general the problem is that administration wants to see education “scale” and the flipper classroom is tied to people. You have to get everyone together at the same time and same place (in-person is best, but I guess Zoom might substitute). This puts a ceiling on scaling.
You still need that interactive instruction. The worse professor I had in college was still better than the ones at MIT - I've never been in the same state as MIT which means they were terrible at interacting with me. And of course the in person interaction does not scale.
Yes, but not for everyone. I used the pandemic as a chance to get back into classroom and ask a lot of questions, and even deliberately chose my spring courses to be online every evening from Monday to Friday, wouldn't pull that off with commute. But I'm sure other people can get much more in-person, when the interaction starts with eye contact and not only when the student is bold enough to unmute.
It's not even learn by doing. It's learn by not knowing. The past couple months literally felt walking in uncharted territory because no one in my school knows about my current research method (so no professor can spot my knowledge gap). I have felt down, up, excited, and anxious as I tread carefully in an area in which I have more knowledge-gap than I have knowledge. A sense of suspense and fear, but also great pleasure that comes with exploring something that few people in my field would even try. It's risky but I like it.
So the culture is, any admission of ignorance or clear signs of knowledge gaps labels you culturally as being incompetent in your field or profession. So this problem stems well beyond school. In school you get a pass of being ignorant. Once you leave, people falsely assume you somehow miraculously have no knowledge gaps which just isn't remotely realistic for any human. Everyone always has knowledge gaps in some context, including their own fields and even specialities.
We need to change the culture so people can admit or show signs of these gaps to improve. I do it often, if I'm sitting in a meeting somewhere and don't know something I let people know I don't know and will fill that gap or ask them to explain so I can learn. This, from my experience, has made more cohesive teams because people are then more willing to admit their own gaps and teams begin to work together more now there's a bit of a humility baseline.
And it's free, for goodness sake.
I checked a couple of courses, and having just lecture notes in the form of PDF or Powerpoints is not a substitute for the actual topic presented in class. I'd rather have text to read than slides with very few words in them.
In this day and age, when some sites want you to register for the most inconsequential of services / downloads, this really is a breath of fresh air.
But what I found is that, for me, a really good way to start learning a new subject is studying from Lecture Notes.
These are generally less dense and more tractable than a whole textbook, and at the same time, you get the written form which I find a bit easier to follow than multiple hours of video.
Of course you miss the depth in some cases, but as introductory content I find them really to the point and easing the learning curve.
There's an aspect of change over time that you get which isn't that easy to show on paper. It helps me better relate one concept to the next.
Filtering just EE/CS, there are 30 or 35 courses with full video lectures on ocw.mit.edu (which are all hosted on Youtube AFAIK). OLL seems to have four.
Sometimes lectures are linked on a class website e.g. the modern Underactuated Robotics lectures: https://underactuated.mit.edu/
If you're going down the rabbit hole, search "site:https://video.odl.mit.edu/collections/" or videolectures.net or archive.org, or you can search MIT's student pages for class assignments. Honestly, this is the only way to find substantial info on some entire fields e.g. Thermal-Fluids Engineering (2.005 and 2.006) ... or Course 2, in general.
It helps to learn a specific school's curriculum (Stanford and Berkeley also have great resources) and target specific courses. You won't find lectures such as MIT's Inference course by looking on Youtube and OCW alone.
[Not just replying to parent comment] If you plan to teach, sample some lectures by Patrick Winston, Anant Agarwal, Donald Sadoway, robert ghrist, and/or David Malan. The modern approach to engineering instruction seems to be 5 to 15 minute snippets posted online, but these five are among my favorite when it comes to full lectures.
I just wish I had had access to this when I was in college.
Still great, though. The format may be ill-fitted to the medium, but any content from people of Strang's human caliber is a rare treat
[0]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
So great, so nerdy, so interesting.
Nothing exciting. Send them feedback on how OCW made a difference in your life and spread the word.
As I mentioned in another comment it was originally pitched as a resource for would be teachers rather than for students directly.