Miscellaneous > The Lounge

idea: bigger wikipedia idea for lectures

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Lead Head:
Yup, I agree. When it comes down to it, its all about making money. If you publish all your lectures and classes on the web for free to be accessed by anyone anywhere, then what really is the point of going to that school?

piratePenguin:
Battery gone, this rushed post is basically why Ireland appears very different to the rest of the world (I knew this, but I've more to discuss when I get back around here)

--- Quote from: Lead Head on  6 February 2010, 02:44 ---Yup, I agree. When it comes down to it, its all about making money. If you publish all your lectures and classes on the web for free to be accessed by anyone anywhere, then what really is the point of going to that school?

--- End quote ---
Is it all about making money?

I actually came to this idea thinking about how I ended up in my course. I chose business studies when I was in my final year of leaving cert (our A levels or equivalent in america). I got enrolled into university in a BS class, and switched to maths on day 1 because I was lead to believe studying maths in college was extremely intense (due to olympiad training I attending a few years before), but in fact it is easier than I ever thought and I could tell just by looking at the timetable on day 1.

So, I was thinking about a website where secondary students could learn more about the degree choices and make better informed decisions, and it seems like the best way to do this is by engaging with the students who are studying that course. There are websites with lots of information about course content but they have no user or student involvement, and the best way to get all of that is if you are the college moodle/blackboard system.

This could be an idea that seems to work much better here in ireland than for example in america. In ireland (there's actually been serious talk of abolishing this system, but currently its probably gonna stick) students dont pay fees (except if theyre not Irish or northern irish citizens (not sure if that applies to all of uk)), The government pays 15k or whatever it is for every student enrolled in every college every year. I'm not sure if the sum varies from college to college, but I'm pretty sure it doesnt.

So essentially, we've got different institutions with different policies, priorities and characteristics but they're all government funded about 85%.

worker201:
In the US, public state universities (which excludes schools like Harvard and MIT) receive funding from the state.  It's just not possible to guess exactly how much, but state residents generally pay 1/4 to 1/2 of what non-residents pay.  Suffice it to say that this is nowhere near 85%.  But even in a situation where the government is funding most of the cost of education, the institution is still a profit-seeking entity, looking to make the most of its government funding.

davidnix71:
Copyrights are a bigger problem in the US. Who exactly owns the rights to the lecture? The university or the prof who gave the lecture? If the prof writes books (most good ones do because there is money in that, and tenure may depend on how many books the prof published) then he/she may not want to give away something they could sell later.

The source material for the lecture may not belong to either the university or the prof, so they can't legally give away something that was not theirs to begin with.

Think about OS's. Microsoft and Apple "publish" operating systems, but those OS's contain material licensed from third parties, so neither MS nor Apple can even legally give away an unsupported OS without getting permission from other people. There has been a petition for years to get Apple to give away system 8 or 8.5, but they just can't.

worker201:

--- Quote from: davidnix71 on  7 February 2010, 21:11 ---Think about OS's. Microsoft and Apple "publish" operating systems, but those OS's contain material licensed from third parties, so neither MS nor Apple can even legally give away an unsupported OS without getting permission from other people. There has been a petition for years to get Apple to give away system 8 or 8.5, but they just can't.

--- End quote ---

Which, by the way, is fucking crazy.  There's got to be a way.  Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, DOS, and any MacOS below X should be free.  In fact, Apple and Microsoft should be out there re-negotiating royalty-free contracts with anyone that is opposed to just giving stuff that outdated away for free.  And anyone who isn't willing to negotiate should be jailed for being a fucking prick - it's not like there's money to be made from the shitty code you contributed to Windows 15 years ago.

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