Free unexpected MIT courses to kick start the new year | Hacker News Reader

Free unexpected MIT courses to kick start the new year

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I have been "taking" the MIT 6.824 (6.5840) distributed systems course, and the course is insanely good. (it is not in this article because this is a very advanced CS course.) You can get all the lectures including guest lectures on Youtube, you get labs with TEST SUITES, you get all the Q&As, you get exam questions AND answers. All for FREE. Perhaps the only thing missing from what an enrolled student would get is TA answering questions and discussing with other students or working on projects (and of course MIT credits), which is not too important for me. As someone without a CS background, the course is extremely helpful in getting into dist system.

All the material except video is hosted on their website. No registration or anything. You run the test suites locally to verify that you correctly completed the assignments. It makes you wonder what happened to Coursera, Udacity and many other MOOC projects that were very optimistic and enthusiastic but got worse and disappointing in recent years. This is how it should be done.

Well, MIT--or probably more precisely individual MIT faculty members and other staff--can do more or less what they want to within reason without woryying about making money..

The MOOC bubble on the other hand (including edX to a certain degree) was both a novelty and depended on rethinking educational economics to a fair degree, which included credentials actually meaning something and that never really happened. The people taking MOOCs mostly weren't those not well-served by traditional higher ed; it was people who already had a Masters degree or two.

All of those platforms were VC funded, and when the VCs demanded their 10x returns they in turn started to squeeze their users and the whole thing collapsed.

I haven't used them lately. Just how bad is the "collapse"? Are there no good courses left? Or something else?

They were in it for the money. MiT and it's staff has mostly traditionally seemed like they valued education.

I want to know if you want to meet up occasionally to discuss/work on the course and the labs? (i.e., be the "other students" you mention.)

I was thinking about starting the the Spring 2024 6.5840 course just this past week. I ran across the course on YouTube while studying Raft and Zoo Keeper. I saw their labs and they have you build RAFT and a KV store on top of RAFT. I'd love to get the experience of building these. I have never written golang, but I am sure I could ramp up on it quickly.

How far along are you?

I took Eric Landers "Introduction to Biology" course before transitioning into bioinformatics (https://www.edx.org/learn/biology/massachusetts-institute-of...). Can highly recomment this course, although it's a little outdated now.

I wish one could get credit for these classes? They’re awesome but it would be more awesome if you could earn towards a degree.

You can, but the catch is getting accepted to MIT first.

And the tuition and time out of the workforce, which puts it out of reach for many, many people.

I'm pretty sure getting accepted to MIT also puts it out of reach for many, many people.

Why would you need it? How would you pass exams? Who would pay for a teacher reading your exam and ensure you don't teach.. etc.

That’s called going to college.

You can however earn certificates for courses through services such as EdX: https://www.edx.org/school/mitx

Although it appears as though you need the “Certified” premium status to achieve certification, which is almost $200USD.

> That’s called going to college.

And thats too expensive for most people. Which is funny because knowledge is mostly free.

Knowledge is free; the time of people pushing the knowledge into you is not free.

(Self-taught in my eyes usually means 'i've picked out the things that interest me and then learned those' - it's the job of the the paid people to force you to learn the things that don't directly interest you)

Going to college is only nominally about acquiring knowledge. In reality it’s about acquiring a credential. All of the gatekeeping involved in admissions and examinations is to protect the value of the credential. The reason MOOC certificates are largely worthless as a credential is because there are NO safeguards against cheating.

There’s a lot more to an MIT education than the credential.

I won’t argue that the credential isn’t useful in that certain people are more willing to consider taking you seriously the first time they meet you (foot in the door), but people with that credential do still fail.

And seriously, when does where you went to school even come up, except on a resume (that “foot in the door”)

>And seriously, when does where you went to school even come up, except on a resume (that “foot in the door”)

Ever met someone who went to Harvard?

ha!

As they saying goes: "Harvard people boast that they 'went to school in Cambridge' because they're embarrassed they couldn't get into MIT"

> I won’t argue that the credential isn’t useful in that certain people are more willing to consider taking you seriously the first time they meet you

If you think that isn't immensely useful, you are vastly underestimating the significance of other people's first pass filters in any person's opportunity for success.

But people only hear where you went to school when applying for a job. In any other kind of human interaction, who cares?

It comes up frequently in several fields and on the East Coast. There’s an entire layer of our economy and government that all but requires the right college to be on your resume.

Most people are never taught to learn on their own or how to self manage the process of gaining knowledge.

That was the point when Hal Abelson convinced MIT that they should support putting as many courses online as possible (having tenure does give you freedom to do good things): that the knowledge is free and if others can get value from it, that would be great!

But it really is just the course material, with some classes also having lectures. It’s not at all the same as attending. A few years ago I needed more thermo than I had remembered from my time as an undergrad. I actually reviewed the same class number I’d taken decades before and it was hard yakka. I am sure I would not have gotten much out of it if I were just reviewing the material cold, without the in person MIT experience in my past.

For some context, OCW was originally created for the ostensible purpose of providing teachers with the raw materials to create their own coursework. At the time audio and video classes weren't commonplace so it really came from a different place than MOOCs would eventually. (One also suspects that the OCW approach probably helped bypass some of the objections that jumping straight to MOOCs would have generated if it were even possible at the time.)

Knowledge is free, just go to the library. However the costs for facilities, equipment, staff, maintenance, etc is not. While college, especially American college, is overpriced (due in large part to the government), SOMEONE still needs to be paid. As the receiving end of the benefits it is only natural you also incur the burden, ideally equally split amongst your peers.

There is no need for in person facilities to learn. Thats 19th century thinking.

If all the knowledge is free and online then why do you care about going to college?

The answer is that college is about more than that. Hands-on learning, collaboration with other students, projects, labs, exams, extra curriculars all add up to a lot more than an online course.

Perhaps. But it is hard to argue that despite all the open content available the current system is remarkably effective at keeping the higher education credential gate firmly closed for the very vast majority of humanity.

Thats why most collegue students are completely useless when they graduate? Because they are.

> That’s called going to college.

This is legacy thinking. There’s no reason that in the Internet age this should be necessary anymore.

The current college system is simply a tradition from a bygone era that hasn’t really adapted to the 21st century yet.

In Finland this is commonplace with ”open university” courses which are just the typical unis offering single ECTS credit courses for a small fee or for free. They are fully fledged courses though. See for example: https://fitech.io/en/ or https://www.mooc.fi/en/

It’s no MIT, but they can count towards an eventual completion of a degree, and if completed with good grades, after 20-40 credits or so you can get admitted directly into a full-time program without any entrance exams or such.

That’s amazing. Thanks for letting us know how it should be done. Hope US Universities are taking notes.

These are not quite serious classes, they are fun experiments. They have a bit of educational value, but it looks to me the professors just put them together just for kicks.

If you want to take MIT classes for credit, you can go to EdX.

https://www.edx.org/school/mitx?

many mit opencourseware classes are serious classes, not just fun experiments

If you are willing to pay, some of the courses and programs like micro masters, micro bachelors on edx can count for credit, which is not necessarily cheap, but may be cheaper than it otherwise might be [1], also see [2] as example.

All though even then, it may be cheaper to just enroll in some local or online classes at a community college in your state for a couple hundred dollars.

[1] https://support.edx.org/hc/en-us/articles/206501438-Can-I-re...

[2] https://www.edx.org/masters/micromasters/purduex-nano-scienc...

the MIT courses, especially the Math stuff, are extremely useful for younger people (eg A levels in the UK)

I think ill do the beatles one

I live the compilation. Do you have more of it ?

As the post notes, these are additions to MIT's longstanding OpenCourseWare project.

https://ocw.mit.edu/search/

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