Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Two interesting things

 Posted this yesterday on Google+ but thought I would share it here too (update at the bottom)
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Found two interesting things today:

First,  a former boss accepted my link on LinkedIn and I noticed he had attended ArsDigita University which was a school I had never heard of before so I looked it up:

ADU was a one-year, intensive post-baccalaureate program in Computer Science based on the undergraduate course of study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The majority of the instructors were professors from MIT and the program was tuition free. After running from September 2000 through July 2001, seeing the first class to graduation, the program was forced to shut down

This site serves a dual purpose. It is here to tell the story of ADU and it is here to carry on the school's mission of supplying free education. Toward this latter end, ADUni.org provides all course materials and lectures generated during the program to the general public for free use

All the courses are there, some may be a little dated but they are there along with the problem sets etc.

While digging through that I found the second item - The ACM guidelines for accreditation for Computer Science, Computer Engineering, IT, IS and Software Engineering programs

If like me you sometimes wonder why a course is included  and what the "experts" think you are supposed to be learning from it this is the place to look.  It lays out the skills and knowledge that the ACM thinks are important and why the think they are.

(Also if like me you find yourself in occasional battles with college administrator types these types of thing are the ammo you need to hammer home your point)

Anyway I thought this stuff was interesting YMMV.

Update:  I dug around at MIT's OpenCourseware Site and many of the classes that were part of the ArsDigita program are still offered and are available online there.  A couple other resources are Udacity and db-class.org as well as Coursera.  With a little effort you can recreate the ArsDigita program on your own.  I still think this is something that Western Governors University could reproduce for an actual computer science program - beyond their currently offered IT degree (Not that there is anything wrong with an IT degree, that is what I am pursuing and I am very happy with the program there is just different emphasis on the areas that should be learned and the outcomes)

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