When I look back at my time at the university in the nineties, I often wish that I had the web in its present form available to me back then. Because many times there were just too many students for the lecturers and the so called student assistants to handle. So, if you got stuck working on a problem, you remained stuck, because you never got around to ask anyone to help you out. There always seemed to be too many other students waiting in line ahead of you.
These days you don’t need to be stuck. Because there is so much material out there on the Internet, especially in the form of lectures caught on video. You can search YouTube for just about any topic, and you will find some video where someone explains it.
Just think about the possibilities. Want to see the lecture again? Replay. Got lost in your own thoughts for a while? Stop and rewind. Don’t understand the angle of approach? Find another video where another person approaches the problem differently. Is background information that you are not so familiar with mentioned? Pause the video and look for one that explains the background information. Things that we could not do back in the nineties.
I believe that there is one university has taken this further than any other. And it really comes as no surprise that MIT is it. At the turn of the millennium MIT decided to put their teaching material out on the net free to the world. Yep, that is right, open source education. They named it MIT Open Courseware. You might not earn a university degree just digging into this material, but you sure can learn just as much as a person who holds a degree. And it offers a great opportunity to people in countries with not so strong economies as to have access to state of the art teaching material.
Eventually many other places of higher education around the globe have followed and form what is called the Open Courseware Consortium.
Here you have a video from MIT about the initiative
Links
The Open Courseware Consortium
A directory of free online courses
Disclaimer
The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.
Further reading:
- Website review : Green Power Science
- Website review : byexample.com
- GLI-member portrait : David Williams, Canada
- Website review : TED Ideas worth spreading
- Website review: World Community Grid
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