LU Blog

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E-learning or distance education allows individuals that are challenged geographically, financially or otherwise to become students at a grade school, undergraduate, graduate or professional development level. The benefits of distance education programs are countless. It unifies rural residents with big city campuses and facilitates the learning and growth of a wider range of people. Distance education as an arm of the traditional public university is not a new concept. However, the programs have been dramatically updated from VHS tapes and correspondence packages into virtual work groups, online examinations and chat forums. Private institutions have also used online learning as the main system of program delivery and many offer fully online programs. The internet acts as a conduit to transfer the courses from professor to student after tuition is paid of course. Although the cost of attending satellite is considerably cheaper than attending in person i.e. no accommodation fees or transportation fees there is still a cost. What if there was no cost?

An emerging trend is to offer free content or open courseware. These open courses offer those that would like to learn a subject area as a hobby, interest or to supplement or improve their professional duties and responsibilities an opportunity to learn. Apple and YouTube have brought this trend to the forefront with their products; iTunes University and YouTube EDU.

iTunes University was initially a collaborative pilot project with six U.S. based institutions. In May of 2007, Apple made iTunes available within the iTunes Store. This opened the public content to millions of users that could freely download lectures, course notes, assignments etc. The store also allowed password protected sections for student of a particular course allowing them to download course updates and much of the same type of material. It was a great success and now boasts content from more than 250 schools from K-12 material to Ivy League.

With the help of YouTube EDU prospective learners can browse the extensive library of videos from subjects ranging from Macroeconomics to Shakespearian Literature.  The concept behind it was to aggregate the educational videos submitted by colleges and universities into one location for the benefit of viewers. It has since ballooned into an extremely popular destination and features videos from top universities including lectures, presentations and sporting events footage.

Open content course initiatives have also been pioneered by individual schools. The Stanford Open Source Lab and MIT’s Open Course Ware programs offer current and past courses online for free.

There are many unanswered questions in the open source model. The most prominent being that there is not yet a method to quantify a persons achievements in the completion all of the assigned readings, assignments and examinations taken through a free course.

The objective of free content is multidimensional. First, it is to deliver content in alternative ways with the hope of each student finding a mode of delivery that suits them. Traditional delivery is done face to face. Second, it is to establish a new feedback loop. The feedback loop of a traditional program is between registered student and employed faculty/administration. The new feedback loop includes feedback from students, informal learners, tutors, experts, organizations etc. By receiving feedback from multiple sources a community of interested parties emerges. Finally, it is the continuous evaluation and improvement of the course/program. With community feedback and technology, courses can be updated daily to reflect new material and events giving student and administrators a current prospective on the material and what works and doesn’t work in its delivery.