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Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007
It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.
To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.
Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.
Steve meant so much to us.
We will miss him terribly.
DrBopperTHP: "EE Times - MIT to put its entire curriculum online free of charge"
Labels: education
The price is right
Thanks to DrBopperTHP for this amazing score of an article - THANKS DR!MIT to put its entire curriculum online free of charge
In 2002, when MIT decided to experiment with placing course contents on the Web for open access, the university's officials knew they were breaking new ground and had no idea how the effort would be received.
On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums available online to date.
Who are MIT's independent learners? One MIT calculation found that 17% were educators elsewhere, 32% students everywhere, and 49% were self learners.
"About 40% of the MIT alumni population uses the site," said Steve Carson, the OCW's external relations director, in an interview Tuesday. "Usually they take courses they didn't have time for while they were students here." The courses are free of charge and no course credit is granted.
Other learners come from nations all over the world, from Antarctica to Darfur. He notes that the highest traffic in the United States comes from leading high-tech states Massachusetts and California. South Korea has a sizable base, accounting for a higher number of learners than, for instance, in China, its neighbor.
I've been using the MITOCW site for continuing medical education purposes for some time. I think it is an invaluable resource, and I recommend it to all who might have a need to access one of the greatest online. distance education/information repositories available. My high school physics teacher was a proto-nerd/hippie MIT grad who almost persuaded me to go there rather than drop anchor in Providence, and wonderfully generous, and magnanimous educational efforts such as this, on the part of this renowned and universally recognized institution of "highest" learning, make me wish I had.
- posted by DrBopperTHP