A New Era of Online Education (And It’s Free)

You’ve heard of colleges and universities offering online courses to students. The online class has even made it into high schools around the country. But there’s a new wave of online education breaking its way into this tech-driven era: free online education. That’s right, I said it, free. Some of the institutes and sources of this free education include Stanford and MIT. Others include the monster that is Apple and its new iTunes U and the breakthrough, YouTube heavy Khan Academy. There are even tools for educators to gather free lesson plans, tips, labs, and exercises for their students through TeacherTube.

In the 2011 fall semester, Stanford University took a test run of their free online courses. The pilot included 350,000 students in 190 countries, 43,000 of which completed a course. Just this past month, the university introduced five free online courses that included Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Natural Language Processing, Cryptography, Game Theory, and Probabilistic Graphical Models. These interactive online classes are taught by members of the Stanford faculty. The classes include video lessons followed by live quizzes and instant feedback for self-evaluation and assessment. The courses will be powered by the start-up company Coursera, which was founded by two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Although you won’t get Stanford credit for completing a course, you will receive a statement of accomplishment for your hard work. Who knows, that could stand out on a job application!

MITx is “MIT’s new online learning initiative.” Through this initiative, MIT is operating through an open-source, scalable software infrastructure. Not only is this infrastructure set up for their free online courses, but they are also testing the waters to provide the software to other universities and K-12 school systems. MIT opened enrollment for their first free online course, Circuits and Electronics (6.002x), on March 5. This course is described on the MITx website as “an on-line adaption of 6.002, MIT’s first undergraduate analog design course.” The course offers online labs, student-to-student and professor-to-student communication, individual assessment, and course material. Like the Stanford courses, displaying mastery of the subject will get you a certificate awarded by MITx.

Apple’s iTunes U has been around for quite some time; however the iTunes U app was released earlier this year to allow anyone with an iTunes account and an Apple mobile device (iPod, iPad, or iPhone) to install the iTunes app and begin downloading courses and getting their learn on. Courses available for download come from a wide range of disciplines: mathematics, science, language, business, communications, and basically any subject you would like to learn more about. The courses come from a pretty impressive lineup of institutions: Duke, Harvard, and Stanford to name a few.

With all of this free education in the world, it seems like there would be some schools taking advantage of it. Professors (if they’re OK with the course curriculum) could teach a class directly from an iTunes U course. Of course, this is not likely to happen, but then again, who knows. It will be interesting to see what the next step to tech-based education is going to be. Live streamed classes for major universities? We certainly have the technology for it.

All in all, it’s free education for those who want it. My advice… Go get it!