online learning
rallain | October 30, 2009In the past couple of weeks, we have had two different publishers 'pitch' their online homework system. First, they are fine people and interesting products, but I just don't think this is going to work.
Online Books
I think the publisher's plan is to have a textbook, and offer extra stuff to go with it (including an ebook). However, for all the ones I have seen, there are problems with the ebooks.
You can't keep them forever. It depends on the terms of the service, and maybe this is long enough. The terms seem to vary from 1 year to 5 years. If you are in certain fields (physic or…
rallain | July 25, 2009Here is an interesting article from Mashable: In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero
In the article, the author Josh makes the following points:
College is expensive and some people can't really afford it.
There is a growing trend in online universities. University of the People is one example.
Other universities are putting a lot of their material online - example MIT's OpenCourseWare project.
There are a growing number of free textbooks available online. I would like to point to an example of a free physics textbook.
Josh also points out that everyone should have a chance to go…
rallain | July 23, 2009I am pretty sure this came up on some email discussion listserv. Someone mentioned that students could just look up the answers to homework on cramster.com. Maybe you are more with it than I am, but I had never heard of this. Of course I had to check it out.
At the basic level, cramster gives solutions to homework problems. I was surprised how many introductory physics texts were available. They even had Classical Electrodynamics by Jackson. They did not have the text I use for calc-based intro physics, Matter and Interactions.
So, I tried it out. The site is pretty nice. They have…