Dude, your free top-shelf education in quantum physics and antigravitational propulsion just became a reality.
For years the universities have worried that posting this kind of material online would cannabilize enrollment. Not so. It can only improve the school's academic prestige and cachet, besides which, students aren't buying the education part of the college education as much as the experience of going to college, which can never be replicated online and which is why I am enrolled again.
The Internet is amazing. To think that a few short years ago we wrote our high school newspaper stories longhand then typed them up on a typewriter. We corrected typos with an Exacto knife and a glue stick.
By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.
The cost? It's all free of charge.
The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite
campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.Intended as an act of "intellectual philanthropy," OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, illustrations, and so on. So far, by giving away their content, the universities aren't discouraging students from enrolling as students. Instead, the online materials appear to be only whetting appetites for more.
The MIT site (ocw.mit.edu), along with companion sites that translate the material into other languages, now average about 1.4 million visits per month from learners "in every single country on the planet,"
The sheer volume and variety of the educational materials being released by MIT and its OCW collaborators is nothing less than stunning. For example, each of the 29 courses that Tufts University in Medford, Mass., has put online so far is "literally the size of a textbook," says Mary Lee, associate provost and point person for the OCW effort there. The material provides much more than "a skeleton of a course," she says. Visitors to Tufts' OCW course on "Wildlife Medicine" call it is the most comprehensive website on that topic in the world, Dr. Lee says.
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