MIT Level Introductory Physics - Free Online Course Starts March 1st

Also, it isn't obvious now, but when they start adding classes in economics, political science, and history, we'll want more diversity, not less. They're likely to go for breadth first and depth later, so each effort will have a single introductory macroeconomics course, a single course about the cold war, and a single course about medieval Europe, with each instructor chosen by a small cadre of people administering that particular set of online courses. Until the software is open-sourced and polished well enough that these programs start popping up all over the place, we'll be limited to the programs that are independently developing their own technology stack. The more, the better.

So many aspects of college-level courses are bound to the institutional needs of colleges. Courses must be taught to several people simultaneously and in sync, must be delivered in semester/quarter/term-long chunks, must be popular enough to support ongoing employment of local faculty & staff, must be taught in a way that allows for objective grading (so, for example, emphasize grammar rules over pronunciation in foreign language, regardless of actual relative importance, because grammar is easier to score "objectively"),and so on.

Right now, these online courses are still basically movies filming plays. These classroom "plays" are the way they are, because that serves the needs of the institutions producing them.

But the most effective way to learn something personally useful probably isn't going to coincide with maximizing an old institution's needs for prestige, profits, politics, and power. I'd like to see these monolithic "degree credentials" broken down to finer-grained "skill credentials" that are available a la carte from competing sources that optimize their approach differently for each specific skill and for learners with different circumstances, with the learning results validated by independent agencies that only care how much you know, not how you learned it, where you learned it, or how long it took.

The last thing I want is a continuation of the "consistent brand and user experience" of today's universities.

Currently MIT offers 4 classes that count for the 8.01 (mechanics) requirement: 8.012, 8.01, 8.01L, or 8.011

Before they even place you in a class, they have you take an analytical exam to determine which class is recommended. This happens during orientation before classes begin, and it's the first of many things MIT does to help you pass the 8.01 requirement.

8.011 is the easiest, but they don't let you take it unless you've already failed one of the other subjects.

8.01 and 8.01L cover the same content, but 8.01L offers an extra month to go over that content. If you try and pass 8.01, but end up with a D (non-passing), they'll let you switch to 8.01L for the extra month.

8.01 is also a TEAL class, which is specially structured (and costs a lot of professor time) to encourage students to work together, and offers time in class to individually work on examples (as opposed to just listening to a professor).

The amount of effort MIT puts in to getting kids to pass the 8.01 requirement on their first try is exceptional. But with all their attempts, many still need to take 8.011.

I don't have numbers, but I'd guess that MIT spends more money teaching students mechanics than any other single graduation requirement. That probably made it a good guinea pig for this course, being that it's focused on education research.

Calculus and mechanics are part of a well rounded education in the same way as Shakespeare's principle tragedies, or an understanding of the causes and consequences of WWI are.

The fact that these building blocks of knowledge are going to be available in the near future for free to anyone with an internet connection is a modern wonder of the world.

Everyone learns from the same exact textbooks. My professors were using the same exact edition of Kleppner and Kolenkow (Into Classical Mechanics) textbook I used. It's even a point of pride for them. The canonical set of books are:

K&R -> Intro Mechanics

Taylor -> Advanced Mechanics

Griffiths -> E&M and Quantum

Sakurai -> Quantum

Boas -> Mathematical methods

(I'm prolly missing a few)

Every physics student in the US is familiar with these books.

Part of the reason for the intransigence is that it weeds out the weaklings. They make Physics very difficult and impenetrable in part so that 1/2 the class drops out and goes to do Bio or CS(which are taught sooo much better) and you're left with the most hard working masochistic students of whom the top 10% will become grad students and slave away for minimum pay for 7 years.

I mean.. they're not actively planning this in an evil-planning-room, but that's the end results and the physics establishment is happy and no one is pushing for new methods of teaching.

I think courses avoid specific technologies to focus on the concepts behind them.