Free courseware from the US
One of the exciting developments in the field of higher education, in my opinion, is the recent explosion of free course offerings by Ivy League universities in the US (and likely elsewhere). My interest in these developments is twofold: (1) what they are offering, ie, I am even interested as a consumer; and (2) how they are offering, ie, what are the models of delivery and what is the long-term perspective from the educational business side.
Obviously, it is fundamentally important that the offerings are done by Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, amongst others. These institutes have a name to loose. And so, you can expect that the course contents are just marvellous, and also offer a lifelong learning opportunity for ourselves. Recent course offerings that I found interesting were about:
software as a service, technology entrepreneurship, introduction to logic, algorithms: design and analysis, probabilistic graphical models.
I have not registered for any of these courses, but am intrigued how they are run, and how their teams accommodate the multiple thousands of course takers. Often, there seem to be pretty advanced web-based learning environments in place. I am uncertain to what extent these are fundamental to the success.
Here are some links:
NY Times on these developments