Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Nobel Laureate's Courses Available at OCW Here's  an excerpt from the latest update about the MIT OpenCourseWare site. This information item underscores what I believe is one of the most important advances that course repositories make to higher education; viewing course materials from other institutions can certainly enhance instruction and learning. The opportunity for instructors and students to peruse the course materials of a Nobel Laureate is priceless. JH ____ The MIT OpenCourseWare Update: October 2004 A Monthly E-mail Newsletter for Users and Friends of MIT OpenCourseWare ---------------------------------------------------------------- The October 2004 MIT OpenCourseWare Update Contains: 1. Nobelist Publishes Two Courses 2. How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site? 3. Digging Deeper: Unified Engineering 4. A Frequently Asked Question 5. Comments 6. Newsletter Available Online at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/newsletter.htm 1. Nobelist Publishes Two Courses ---------------------------------------------------------------- MIT Professor Frank Wilczek has won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for a "colorful" discovery in the world of quarks, the building blocks of the atomic nucleus. Wilczek's work, which involves the dominant -- or "color," force between quarks -- is key to several major problems in particle physics and beyond. Wilczek, 53, shares the prize of about $1.3 million with David J. Gross of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and H. David Politzer of the California Institute of Technology. Check out his two courses published on MIT OCW: Course 8.325 -- Relativistic Quantum Field Theory III, which directly reflects on the work that won Wilczek the Nobel Prize, and Course 8.012 -- Physics I, an introductory physics course which presents elementary mechanics, Newton's laws, concepts of momentum, energy, angular momentum, rigid body motion, and non-inertial systems. 2. How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site? ---------------------------------------------------------------- The MIT OCW Web site now offers free and open access to 914 courses, ranging from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT schools -- Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Science, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Sloan School of Management. With more than 900 courses available, users frequently ask, "Just how much educational content is really available on the MIT OCW Web site?" MIT OCW is a content-rich Web site that is 48 gigabytes in size; offering courses that contain 14,717 HTML pages, 15,640 unique PDF documents, and 16,078 images -- overall 55,171 total files for use by MIT's global audience. All of this is made available through the generosity of 536 MIT faculty, with many more signed on for future publication cycles. 9:02:43 AM    COMMENT []