ACM TechNews
Internet Opens Elite Colleges to All
Associated Press (12/29/07) Pope, Justin
MIT's "OpenCourseWare" initiative has made virtually all of the school's
courses available online for free, including lecture notes, tests, and
video lectures. Many of MIT's new online "students" are college teachers
themselves that use MIT professors as guides in designing their own classes
or as a source for help for their own students. While MIT's initiative is
the largest, other top universities are also making their course material
available online. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns
Hopkins, Tufts, and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools
promoting their open courseware. Princeton allows Internet users to watch
prominent guest speakers, and Yale recently announced it would make
material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more courses
to be added in the future. Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, and Duke have all made
lectures, panels, and performances available on iTunes U, a part of Apple's
music and video downloading service that offers free material from 28
colleges. Berkeley also recently announced that it will be the first to
make full course lectures available on YouTube. These online experiences
are not the full college experience as students are unable to ask questions
or earn credit or a degree, but these limitations are what make such
programs possible. The Internet has transformed higher education, and has
made online learning a multibillion-dollar industry, but the role of elite
colleges and universities in higher education has been unclear.
OpenCourseWare gets more than 1 million hits per month, with translated
materials getting another 500,000 hits. MIT's Steve Carson says the online
courses will allow those who need the knowledge, but not the certification,
to learn the skills they need.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2007/12/29/AR2007122900855.html?hpid=sec-tech
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