On 10/4/12 2:47 AM, phoebe ayers wrote:
Here is something I've been thinking about lately.
Do we have a policy
or a practice on linking to open courses in articles, for instance the
MIT courses available at
http://ocw.mit.edu?
As universities increasingly move to posting their courses and
lectures online, it seems to me like these would be useful links to
curate and add to the relevant (broad) articles.
I have a mild preference against linking that kind of thing from general
articles, because they seem, well, too general to me. Sure, an open
course on statistics is a way to learn more about [[statistics]], but
there are a million others ways, too: there are regular textbooks (often
the best introduction), open-access textbooks (sometimes great), online
tutorials, Wolfram MathWorld, YouTube lecture series, etc. Curating
"more online resources about statistics" starts to seem more like a job
for dmoz or Google, than for us.
I do try to link *specific* parts of online course materials from more
specific articles. For example, if an open course has a particularly
good tutorial overview / explanation of / derivation of transformation
matrices as used in 3d graphics, imo it'd be appropriate for
[[transformation matrix]] to link it, because that becomes more focused.
Best,
Mark