Question about open courseware classes

[elegantlion]

Does completion of these classes hold any extra weight with colleges? I know they're not outside verification as with AP or SAT II, but do they have any merit in the application process? I'm thinking of high school level, like Hippocampus, and/or college level like MIT or Academic Earth. Obviously there is no way to prove how much of a syllabus you completed. Just curious.

[FaithManor]

Excellent question and I wish I could answer it. Ds is just starting some MIT opencourseware and he is a 9th grader. So, we don't for certain yet.

 

I will be keeping a portfolio of his work to show that he completed the coursework. It will be a pain to keep it but he has a dream of attending MIT and his back-up plan is Michigan Technological University (engineering, computer geek school) so I hope that proving he did some MIT work will show them that he is ready to work on that level in addition to a good ACT/SAT score.

 

I guess I will know in four years. Hopefully someone else on the board has recently graduated a student who used opencourseware and will have a better answer.:bigear:

 

Faith

[elegantlion]

Thanks, Faith. I wonder how new the use of open courseware itself is? Perhaps this is the front edge of homeschoolers using those resources. I've looked at several recently that may appeal to ds and will probably use one or two each year.

[FourOaks]

I am also very interested to find out if anyone on here has firsthand knowledge of this as we are looking into some courses for our daughter. It's really quite amazing what is available for free. Any sites besides the ones already mentioned that anyone is willing to share?

[flyingiguana]

My guess is that listing these courses in your course descriptions will give the colleges some idea as to what you covered in your own courses -- much as listing textbooks will do.

 

So it may show the level of rigor of what your student did, but I'm not sure it will do a whole lot more than that. As there's no grade, there's no way for the college to know how well the student took in the material.

 

Also, those courses tend to vary in their level.

[Jane in NC]

Here is another case of it may depend upon the college...

 

Some parents report that colleges to which their kids apply only want test scores and transcripts. My son applied to LACs and a university honors program that wanted a glimpse into who he is. Admissions officers at these schools told me that they enjoyed seeing book lists and course descriptions. So the open courseware listings can give some insight to staff at certain schools.

 

We did not use open courseware completely for any one course (although occasionally looked up some topics on Hippocampus). We did use a number of Teaching Company courses which I listed within my son's course descriptions.

 

Paula--as your son enters high school, I would start writing down all of the books, open courseware listings, etc. that you utilize. It may turn out that you'll never have to write detailed descriptions, but, if you do, you'll want to have these notations at hand.

[elegantlion]

Thank you all. I'm pretty good about keeping records, in fact I'm probably in the overkill department, but I'd rather have more information on hand than not enough.

 

At this point the practical choice for college is the local university, which would not be hard to be accepted. They won't care one iota about course descriptions. He has wanderlust written into his DNA. If that kicks in when thinking about college, I want him to have a good shot at more lofty goals as well.

[Ester Maria]

There is no reason not to list them as a part of the course description or add them to the standard course bibliography, but as with any other thing which you do not officially test someplace else to get some sort of formal recognition that you did it, the only value it has is "mom claimed such and such", which means that colleges may interpret it as they wish and give it as little or as much weight as they wish.

In other words - you have nothing to lose by listing it, but do not let your hopes of extra recognition go very high either.

Edited June 30, 2011 by Ester Maria

[Jane in NC]

Thank you all. I'm pretty good about keeping records, in fact I'm probably in the overkill department, but I'd rather have more information on hand than not enough.

 

At this point the practical choice for college is the local university, which would not be hard to be accepted. They won't care one iota about course descriptions. He has wanderlust written into his DNA. If that kicks in when thinking about college, I want him to have a good shot at more lofty goals as well.

 

Remember Paula that an interesting LAC might find a student from a small town with your zipcode to be quite fascinating. Also, that LAC might be cheaper than the State U after financial aid considerations. Don't write it off.

 

Jane

[Kathy in Richmond]

My guess is that listing these courses in your course descriptions will give the colleges some idea as to what you covered in your own courses -- much as listing textbooks will do.

 

So it may show the level of rigor of what your student did, but I'm not sure it will do a whole lot more than that. As there's no grade, there's no way for the college to know how well the student took in the material.

 

Also, those courses tend to vary in their level.

 

:iagree: My college-age daughter used MIT opencourseware in her high school curriculum for computer science, an area I can't help her with much at all (I stopped at Fortran V back in the dark ages...). She chose OCW based on her older brother's recommendation and her learning goals. We listed it as such on her transcript and summarized the course content in her course descriptions document. We didn't expect it to make her application much stronger because it was just her word that she covered the material with no outside evaluations. But it was a great learning experience. Competitive colleges are going to be much more interested in your testing results (I was told over and over from the schools my kids applied to that homeschoolers' test scores counted 'more' since the mommy grades weren't something they could verify). And they're going to want letters of recommendation speaking to your kids' academic and social abilities...

 

I love opencourseware myself! The links on this page will point you to many, many free courses available on the web.

 

I'd also like to touch on another point that flyingiguana raised as it pertains to MIT's opencourseware, since I'm most familiar with their offerings. They do vary greatly in level. Some of their classes (Kitchen chemistry comes to mind) are simply freshman advising seminar 6 unit classes. A typical MIT unit load is 48 units per term if you take four classes, and many "hard core" students take up to 60! So it's a course that's meant more for 'fun' than anything else, and it's not going to fill any student's degree requirements. I love that class & the teacher (Patty was my son's freshman chem teacher; she's amazing), but it's not going to give you an indication of whether your kid is really ready for MIT coursework. Another example - the introductory programming courses are meant to get new students up to speed if they enter MIT w/o prior programming experience. Programming languages are treated as a tool that everyone's supposed to have, but they're definitely not the emphasis of an MIT computer science degree.

 

More ways to decipher MIT's OCW offerings:

Any course with a course number of x.09x (like 6.092) are experimental courses that haven't stood the test of time & haven't been adopted as a course requirement yet. And any course labeled IAP means that it was designed as a January interim course. That's the month between semesters when the kids do something different (to escape the pressure cooker for a few weeks, lol).

 

On the other hand, courses like 6.001 and 6.042 are what my son recommends (he's here today :D) that you look at if you want to get a better feel for the first steps toward a computer science degree at MIT. My daughter did the 6.001 class (structure and interpretation of computer programs) after she completed AP computer science (Java) self-studied at home. The 6.042 is Math for Computer Science. My son says that this one is introductory and without so much lab-based work, so it might be easier to implement at home. It covers discrete math like probability and combinatorics and more - fun stuff!

 

I mentioned this in another thread recently, but MIT has a special OCW site for high school kids. It might be another valuable place to start looking. They have some AP-specific course helps if you click on the "exam prep" link on the left side of that page.

Edited July 1, 2011 by Kathy in Richmond

[elegantlion]

In other words - you have nothing to lose by listing it, but do not let your hopes of extra recognition go very high either.

 

That was my thinking as well.

 

Remember Paula that an interesting LAC might find a student from a small town with your zipcode to be quite fascinating. Also, that LAC might be cheaper than the State U after financial aid considerations. Don't write it off.

 

Jane

 

Ah, yes, I had forgotten about demographics coming into play.

[elegantlion]

 

I mentioned this in another thread recently, but MIT has a special OCW site for high school kids. It might be another valuable place to start looking. They have some AP-specific course helps if you click on the "exam prep" link on the left side of that page.

 

Thank you, Kathy, your entire post in most helpful. I've browsed through the MIT site a lot, there are so many options. I wasn't sure how to gauge the level of classes, thank you.

[FourOaks]

Kathy,

Thanks for all your information. That is indeed very helpful.

Blessings!