[WikiEN-l] links to open courses?

[Mark]

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