my saturday share

I read this Deseret News article http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705298649/Universities-will-be-irrelevant.html a week or so ago and according to it, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, 'Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living ... today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed.' In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer.

An interesting article. Speaking of which, I have been enjoying this exceedingly (as my Dad would say) Yup, open and free college courses (though no college credit of course), from Yale, Notre Dame, and MIT no less. Yet another reason why I love the internet.
http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945/content/sessions.html

I particularly enjoyed Yale's Professor Hungerford’s lecture on the novel Everything is Illuminated (lectures #24 and #25) in light of Lacy’s recent recommendation. I had been getting her lectures off of Youtube so imagine my delight when I discovered the actual site that made them all readily available. Have a look around, scroll through the course lists, there is something for everyone.

http://oyc.yale.edu/
Open Yale Courses

http://ocw.nd.edu/
Notre Dame Open Course Ware

http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/200-free-online-classes-to-learn-anything
Online Education Database. Lists 200 free online classes to learn practically anything.

http://ocw.usu.edu/
Utah State Open Course Ware

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm
MIT Open Course Ware

http://www.word2word.com/coursead.html
Free Online Language courses. I’ve been wanting to learn me some Cherokee.

http://ocw.umb.edu/
University of Mass Boston Open Course Ware

http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/courses/freecourses.cfm
BYU offers several free online courses

There are many others as well. Here’s a site that ranks Universities by their open course ware
http://degreedirectory.org/articles/25_Colleges_and_Universities_Ranked_by_Their_OpenCourseWare.html

Looks like the wave of the future.