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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

I fondly remember learning about OCW for the first time, about 10ish years ago. As a fresh engineer in India, on the cusp of just moving to cheap broadband, at blazing speeds of 5 mbps, I was giddy with excitement of learning from the same lectures an MIT student gets to learn.

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.

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Coursera's Learning to Learn class by Barbara Oakley and her book "Mind for Numbers" [0] really changed my life. Can you point to specific courses and or books, from MIT's OpenCourseWare, that helped you become a confident learner?

[0] https://barbaraoakley.com/books/a-mind-for-numbers/

I saw a lot of Physics lectures from Walter Lewin.

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 can totally relate to this and remember the first OCW. Also from India, I always feel that the web of that era pushed a lot with regards to making an open, knowledge sharing platform.

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.

> "It helped me learn how to learn" …

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.

Agree and I would like to echo you. I feel I owe so much to OCW , fundamentals and concepts helped me through early career here in India.

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