Consider where the Internet was 15, 10 or even 5 years ago and you have to acknowledge that we witnessing a significant change in your culture and society.
Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas Season and a Happy New Year.
Taking some time off over the holiday season. Be back in the new year.
Faculty using open education resources (OER) or free resources to help save students thousands of dollars on textbooks is not new, it is just getting more popular and easier to do. With the proliferation of tablets and growth of OER sites like Connexions, MITOpenCourseware and Flatword Knowledge it is getting much easier for faculty to include high quality FREE textbooks and related content in their courses.
The UMass’ Open Education Initiative is not the only major open educational resources project that focuses on offering high quality free learning resources to students. Washington State’s Open Course Library initiative includes 42 courses that provide free textbooks, or course content. Both UMass and Washington State projects are looking to significantly expand and are offering faculty incentives for converting over more courses to free course content.
MIT Will Offer Certificates to Outside Students Who Take Its Online Courses – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
How, do you make money on FREE online courses? Charge for assessment and certification. In a brilliant move to maximize its brand, MIT will be adding to its library of FREE online courses and by the spring of 2012 will start charging for assessment and certification. To ensure that that they don’t water down their brand, MIT will be offering the certification under another name. Regardless of what they call it everyone will know it is still MIT.
A person now has three ways to get and MIT education:
- Face2Face – assuming you have the money and the entrance requirements
- Online + Certification – do all the work online, pass the assessements and earn a certificate
- Online – use all the online content to learn what you want to learn – for FREE
This move by MIT is great for students because it gives them even more options to learn from the best. Hopefully it will also push the academy to step up and start emulating the leaders in the Ivy League.
