James Thornton

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James Thornton's Nexus Watch, October 18, 2000: MIT Web Curriculum Free Online If you are looking for information on MIT's announcement on April 4, 2001, then be sure to see Related Links located at the bottom of this page. In 1999, Philip Greenspun, a MIT professor and Chairman of ArsDigita, decided to freely distribute the curriculum used to teach the MIT course entitled Software Engineering for Web Applications (6.916). This one-term, seinor-level course was developed at MIT by Hal Abelson, Michael Dertouzos, and Philip Greenspun -- it is offered at several universities: including, MIT University of Hamburg New York University California Institute of Technology UC Berkeley Stanford University UCLA University of Michigan Philip (who doesn't like to be called Dr. Greenspun) states, "the course gives students the following skills": ability to distinguish between good and bad Web service ideas the technical ability to build any of the sites that are currently live on the public Internet, with one set of tools an understanding of Web standards and an ability to apply that understanding to practical publishing problems (e.g., "why isn't my site being indexed by public search engines?") ability to effectively use a relational database management system to support Web-based collaboration ability to construct an ecommerce service from scratch You will find the free curriculum on the course page (including the online versions of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, SQL for Web Nerds, and Tcl for Web Nerds), and you can access more MIT Course 6.916 curriculum (including lecture notes, projects, the final exam and its answers) by going to http://6916.lcs.mit.edu/class/6916-f2000 and logging in (login=anonymous, password=changeme). This course is similar to what is offered through the ArsDigita Boot Camp, except the Boot Camp is "more intensive and the longer versions also cover Unix sysadmin and Oracle dba." You can try it at home with their home study program, and they say that if you join ArsDigita after completing it, you will earn a $10,000 signing bonus. Streaming Video Philip also offers three short courses (one day or less) available online for free using streaming video: One-day Web course One-day Web tools course for programmers One-evening Web course for everyone (no video available) Papers and Software Toolkits In addition to everything else, Philip Greenspun made the decision to freely "distribute knowledge acquired during the construction and operation of Web-based information systems" online via the ArsDigita Systems Journal. There you will find educational treasures in the form of papers and software toolkits: such as, Building Collaborative Web Services Using the ArsDigita Community System, a free open-source toolkit ArsDigita Server Architecture, a way to keep that beautiful site up and running reliably Adding Collaboration to Your Web Site (without installing an RDBMS or hiring a dbadmin) Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers Web-based Email, an implementation case study Adding Wireless Users To Your Web Service Scored Searching on RDBMS-backed Web Sites Clickstream Data Warehousing Interfacing a Web Service with PC-Attached Data Collection Hardware Surveys, a complete solution Event Planning and Registration Integrating Travel Reservations into a Web Service Building an Online Community (Online Book) Many-2-Many: New Solutions in Collaborative Commerce Beyond "One-to-One": The Power of Purposeful Communities

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James Thornton,<jamesjamesthornton.com> Services: Internet Strategy

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Reader's Comments

After writing this column, I enhanced JamesThornton.com with the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). With a module, ACS will run on Apache, but I decided to run ACS in its native envronment so I switched to AOLserver.

Actually, JamesThornton.com uses OpenACS -- ACS ported for use with PostgreSQL (free and open-source) instead of Oracle (expensive and closed source).

The comment that you are reading was generated using ACS's add-comments-to-static-pages module, and it demonstarates one of ACS's many features that allow site users to add content to the site.

-- James Thornton, April 4, 2001

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-- Matt John, February 24, 2010

Related Links

• MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web- MIT announced on April 4, 2001, that it plans to make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet over the next ten -- even video lectures, available for free.   (contributed by James Thornton)

• ArsDigita University- "ArsDigita University exists to provide the world's best on-campus experience. That said, we also do everything in our power to make our curriculum, lectures, and teaching materials available to interested learners worldwide."   (contributed by James Thornton)

• Cardean University- "An accredited online university offering professional development and education courses. The courses are developed with some of the world's leading universities: including, Columbia Business School, Stanford University, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, and London School of Economics and Political Science."   (contributed by James Thornton)

• Teaching Software Engineering -- lessons from MIT- "This is a report on what [Hal Abelson and Philip Greenspun] have learned during the first four semesters of teaching a new subject at MIT: Software Engineering of Innovative Internet Applications. We present new ideas in teaching computer science students to build the kinds of applications demanded by society. We discuss methods for involving alumni as teaching assistants and coaches. We argue for the method of helping students achieve fluency by assigning five complete applications for construction in a semester rather than the traditional single problem in a software engineering semester" (Presented at the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference - Hong Kong, May 1-5, 2001).   (contributed by James Thornton)

• MIT Course 6.170, Laboratory in Software Engineering- Course material available online. Students write code in Java.   (contributed by James Thornton)

• Educational Uses of the WWW at MIT- A growing list of courses using the World Wide Web at MIT.   (contributed by James Thornton)

• Stanford Online- "Stanford, through Stanford Online, is the first university to incorporate video with audio, text, and graphics in its distance learning offerings Stanford Online also allows students to ask questions or otherwise interact with the instructor, teaching assistant, and/or other students asynchronously from their desktop computer. Stanford Online is credited by many sources as a significant contributor to the growth of Silicon Valley, and to the competitive technical advantage of companies that participate in continuing education through distance learning."   (contributed by James Thornton)

• Distance Learning at Carnegie Mellon- Carnegie Mellon offers distance learning programs in its School of Computer Science, its H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management and its Graduate School of Industrial Administration.   (contributed by James Thornton)

• Harvard's Distance Learning Courses- Extension School courses are open-enrollment, so anyone can register to take a course as long as there are still seats available in that course.   (contributed by James Thornton)