Online Education

Those days when an Ivy-league education was restricted to a limited number of privileged individuals are doomed. Each day, more people around the globe enjoy access to top-notch free college education. In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spearheaded the efforts to offer free course materials with the launch of the website MIT OpenCourseWare. Recently, other initiatives have broken into the scene, such as edX (with lower case initial), Udacity, and Coursera.

After ten years of free service, MIT OpenCourseWare accumulates materials from over two thousand courses, ranging from Science and Engineering to Humanities and Management. I have downloaded syllabuses*, class notes, projects, and exams from many challenging courses. MIT OpenCourseWare is a nonprofit but expensive initiative, so someday I should send them a check to support their endeavor.

EdX is a new nonprofit consortium created by Harvard and MIT (Berkeley and the University of Texas have joined this effort too) to offer online university courses taught by their well-known faculty. This fall semester, edX launched six complete computer and science courses with weekly video lectures, quizzes, projects, and a certificate of completion for those students who finish each course. EdX will add more courses each semester.

Coursera and Udacity are for-profit start-ups launched this year by people related to the Stanford University and funded with venture capital. Currently, both sites are free. The owners expect to generate profits in the future granting certificates of completion and college credits for a fee, training employees for companies, and charging a small tuition. In Coursera, I signed up for an intriguing course called “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue.” The Facebook page of Coursera says that over 138,000 people have signed up for this course that starts next week. I think we will be very packed in that classroom.

Fortunately, new opportunities for self-instruction and life-long learning appear every day. Will someday online and alternative education replace traditional education? Today, it is difficult to answer that question. Yet traditional education will need to keep up with the times. In the future, the options to gain knowledge will be unlimited.

*“Syllabuses” sounds strange for me, but that is the plural of “syllabus” according to the dictionary. The other plural is “syllabi.”