MIT OCW: The Latest Learning Aid

MIT OCW (Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare) is the latest digital stuff that aids in educational advancement. Just like Learning Objects (LO), it is also available in the web to be accessed by anyone, and does the same purpose of the latter. OpenCourseWare and Learning Objects exist to help uplift the level of education by being useful means to teaching and learning process.

OpenCourseWare is defined as “a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses” (OCW Consortium). Learning Objects, lecture notes, even video presentations of various courses, and the like are components of opencourseware. It was through the combined forces of MIT, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that MIT OpenCourseWare materialized. It started with a concept spurred by their university's goal, to have a world wide web of knowledge that raises the quality of learning which entails quality life around the globe. OCW was proposed on 2000, and then a year later, it was announced in New York Times. On 2002, there were available materials of 50 courses, ran up to 1800 courses on 2007, and still increasing this year.

Putting “all of the educational materials from undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available” through the Internet makes the wide access to information possible. Anyone who has access to the Internet can view and download the lecture notes (and lecture videos), homework problems and exams that are often with solutions, reading list and discussion topics of the available courses (Wikipedia). These are helpful tools for students in improving their knowledge of the courses and in understanding better the more difficult courses. Course syllabi are also available. Teachers can use the course syllabi as a tool to improve their own course syllabus.

OCW is a very promising tool for teaching and learning, in which benefits are much more pronounced and limitations are few. Though OCW is innovative, it is non-interactive since it is just a publication of university materials. We use the downloadable materials as how we use books. We can have them only as supplements or references for the process of teaching and learning. True education requires interaction, and this is what the opencourseware could not offer. It is also made clear by the MIT that it is not distance-learning, credit-bearing, or degree-granting initiative. On the other hand, MIT pointed out OCW's benefits below:

• Institutions around the world could make direct use of the MIT OpenCourseWare materials as references and sources for curriculum development. These materials might be of particular value in developing countries that are trying to expand their higher education systems rapidly.
  

• Individual learners could draw upon the materials for self-study or supplementary use.

• The MIT OpenCourseWare infrastructure could serve as a model for other institutions that choose to make similar content open and available.
  

• Over time, if other universities adopt this model, a vast collection of educational resources will develop and facilitate widespread exchange of ideas about innovative ways to use those resources in teaching and learning.
  

• MIT OpenCourseWare will serve as a common repository of information and channel of intellectual activity that can stimulate educational innovation and cross-disciplinary educational ventures.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) was organized to take the same step that MIT is doing. So far, there are universities of 20 countries only and other few affiliate organizations who are members of the consortium. Sad to say, there is none yet of the universities and colleges in the Philippines that has joined the consortium because none, so far, has tried developing one. To extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world is one of the consortium’s goal. Membership is easy: to have published at least 10 courses under the institution’s name in an opencourseware format is one important basis. Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be great if UP is the first educational institution in our country to become a member of OCW Consortium? It would be such a great advantage to have our own opencoursewares in our university’s website. We can have both; we'll help in the advancement of education by sharing UP Education around the world, at the same time, we'll get the prestige of being the first university in the country to develop and use OCW.

References:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=31

(I wrote this article for the e-newsletter of UP Mindanao Interactive Learning Center)

Yahoo drops behind the internet race

Terminating hundreds of employment is a solution to Yahoo’s gradual decline of profitability to help increase the company’s financial performance which is seriously affected by Google’s supremacy in the Internet search race. The said previous leading company in the Internet search will be focusing on the more profit-generating areas.

Yahoo kept the details of layoff plan as a secret. However, Diana Wong stressed that “Yahoo plans to invest in some areas, reduce emphasis in others, and eliminate some areas of the business that don’t support the company’s priorities. Yahoo continues to attract and hire talent against the company’s key initiatives to create long-term stockholder value.”

Mr. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, confirmed on Yahoo’s conference call that there are three specific goals of Yahoo that will be revitalized: (a) to become a “starting point” for the most consumers on the Web, (b) to extend its advertising offerings to sites across the Web and (c) to open up Yahoo’s technology infrastructure to third-party developers and publishers.

According to the sources that this plan aims to revive Yahoo’s incredible amounts lost since the inception Google and due the increasing competition with MySpace and Facebook. Miguel Helft, New York Times news writer, explained further that as a result, Yahoo’s share of the overall online advertising market has declined but still nothing can beat the number of its 500 million users worldwide visiting each month.

Yahoo company executives made clear that Internet search, e-mail, the Yahoo front page and the personalized home-page service MyYahoo, and fields on news, finance and sports will be prioritized areas of concerns on Yahoo’s plan, while other areas of services such as Yahoo 360 which is proven failure as a social networking feature of Yahoo, photo sharing, premium music and online auctions will be de-emphasized.

The said company refused to give exact numbers of employees that will be affected but according to the sources that it will be more likely 10-20% from the overall employees of 14,000.

A rant against fake SEO specialist

Basic Link Farming Strategies for SEO

“This post is about the various basic link farming strategies
use by the people for SEO. These Link farming methods for
SEO may be very simple, but they form the core. Do not ignore them.
All advance strategies should be applied in tandem with them and
they have proven their worth in bringing results over time.” ~Anuj Pathania

The blog title is syntactically good. But it is semantically brain-shaking, I would say. I was so confused of what he meant by that. The word “link farm” is a bad, really bad stuff in the realm of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It is the laziest way of getting incoming links to presumably get higher ranking in the search engine results page. Link farm is defined as interlinked websites to increase link popularity. It is characterized by the presence of uncategorized several links in a web page (Neuracom). Thus, it is considered spam by the search engine spider. This will put your website in jeopardy by either losing the page rank or be removed from the search engine cache.

I may be too harsh in calling the author “nuts” and I apologize for that. You can’t blame a reader if he’s irritated the way the blog author uses, places and repeat unnecessary conjunctions such as “in a nutshell.” Using that line, his voice sounds irritatingly expert in his field. Perhaps, he is expert in the process and principles of SEO but I doubt his credibility now because of the term he used which I would say is definitely wrong. I am still on the process of mastering the world of SEO but I already knew how disreputable link farm or link farming is. Upon reading further, I admit that he is talking about the right SEO strategy but some statements are purely out of his own understanding of the scope by imagination, not understanding out of experiences. He only got it wrong for having seriously mistaken Link Building as Link Farming. Both are entirely opposite. Now, I think that justifies why I called him nuts.

• But more importantly the greater the number of links more will be your search engine ranking (SER), because search engine use them as measure of your website quality. Why? In a nutshell more are the links to your website, more search engines assume that people are finding your website high in quality and discussing about it by placing links to you. They are bots, remember? They can not differentiate between links placed by you or others, until now at least. Also not all links are of equal weight. But we will not be talking about it here.

Personally, I even hate the way he delivers his statement above. He emphasizes the quantity of links and not even mentioning “quality links.” He talks about weight of the links but not even directly digging on what they’re all about. Such makes him like a juvenile SE optimizer. It is a sin for me to call him SEO specialist anyway. Yes, he's right that crawlers are bots: they certainly cannot distinguished links placed by the same person or another. But he must remember that time will come that Google will ban website that caters links that are actually empty.

• Website Directory Submission - There are tens of thousands of website which are acting as web directories. They just maintain a listing of other websites in their relevant categories. They can boost both your link count as well as traffic. Some are paid, most of them are free.

Directory submission is good. But we must also bear in mind that there are websites that appear like directories but are actually link farms that exist only for the purpose of collecting all kinds of website links. The distinction between directories from link farms is seen on the web layout or content. There must be profound categorization for links and that there must be no presence of advertisement on pills, gambling, and pornography anywhere in the web page. Pop outs that appear on the page that contain irrelevant content (mostly porn stuff) are even enough proof that the website claiming to be a directory is a link farm or spammed site. The author never ever mentioned to be aware of this. Is he hiding something?

• Requesting Link via Email- …Also higher the PR (Page Rank) of the website linking to you the more powerful is the link…

Reciprocal links works mostly if the website you are linking to has the same page rank with yours. How absolutely nuts you are if you link to a website with lower page rank than yours. The author tells us the other way around, that we must link to a website with higher ranking without even telling us that it is impossible to happen. There is no such thing as charity for sharing one’s page rank to the other in the SEO industry.

• P.S.: This list is by no mean exhaustive, I am going to constantly update it with new methods when I come across one.

Wow! I thought it was an article but the "P.S." at the end of the write-up only makes it a letter, pseudo-letter to be specific. Well, I'm quite sure that aside from being a confused SE optimizer, he's also a confused writer on not being able to differentiate article from a letter. I even wonder how he would be able to give us new methods when a simple term for a thing is mistaken for another, the worse is to name it to its opposite. It’s either he is giving Link Building a bad name or elevating the value of search engines' top one enemy—Link Farming. Well just to be fair, I can't deny that he's not totally nuts because he's telling some good advices how to do SEO. I just hate him of being careless and unthinkingly wrote such article.