Wow, Gerald Sussman (SICP) is one of the professors, another one is the director of CSAIL. If you are not in the US, or if you are not in a top university, why would you study in your university instead of studying from top material like this?
Labs, office hours, networking, research opportunities, independent study, structural constraints, etc.
I love the whole movement of making lecture recordings available online for free. Ready and open access to learning has long been an ideal of academia. But it's not likely to topple the ivory tower any time soon, there's just too much that it can't do.
There's also plenty that it can do but isn't yet, leaving many areas to target if you want to do an EDU startup. "Video lectures plus computer-administered homework" is not the endpoint.
Not disagreeing with you, but, as a point of reference, I took 6.002 in person and I didn't take advantage of any of those opportunities for that class. You could argue that it's my loss, and you'd be right, but in practice you can replicate many MIT students' 6.002 (or any other class) experience with just videos and a looming final exam.
Exactly. In my experience the vast majority of students rarely if ever take advantage of office hours.
Also, the lack of hands on labs and research isn't going to matter most of the time. That being said, EE is one of the majors where physical labs are essential, but for CS there's really no need.
