Mega-Universities For The New Millennium

Internet Makes Top Colleges Accessible To All

(AP)  Gilbert Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He's written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course.

Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach.

An MIT initiative called "OpenCourseWare" makes virtually all the school's courses available online for free - lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang's Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 million times since June alone.

Strang's classroom is the world.

In his Istanbul dormitory, Kemal Burcak Kaplan, an undergraduate at Bogazici University, downloads Strang's lectures to try to boost his grade in a class there. Outside Calcutta, graduate student Sriram Chandrasekaran uses them to brush up on matrices for his engineering courses at the elite Indian Institute of Technology.

Many "students" are college teachers themselves, like Sheraz ali Khan at a small engineering institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Noorali Jiwaji, at the Open University of Tanzania. They use Strang and other MIT professors as guides in designing their own classes, and direct students to MIT's courses for help.

Others are closer to MIT's Cambridge, Mass., campus. Some are MIT students and alumni, while others have no connection at all - like Gus Whelan, a retiree on nearby Cape Cod, and Dustin Darcy, a 27-year-old video game programmer in Los Angeles who uses linear algebra regularly in his work.

"Rather than going through my old, dusty books," Darcy said, "I thought I might as well go through it from the top and see if I learn something new."

There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious.

The world's top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they're arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information.

And mostly, they are giving it away.

MIT's initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.

As with many technology trends, new services and platforms are driving change. Last spring marked the debut of "iTunes U," a section of Apple's popular music and video downloading service now publicly hosting free material from 28 colleges. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley recently announced it would be the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. Berkeley was already posting lectures, but YouTube has dramatically expanded their reach.

If there isn't yet something for everyone, it's only a matter of time. On iTunes, popular recent downloads include a climate change panel at Stanford, lectures on existentialism by Cal-Berkeley professor Hubert Dreyfus, and a performance of Mozart's requiem by the Duke Chapel Choir. Berkeley's offerings include 48 classes, from "Engineering Thermodynamics" to "Human Emotion."

"It's almost as good as being there," said Whelan, the Massachusetts retiree, of the MIT classes he has sampled. "The only thing that's lacking is the pressure." He says he usually doesn't do the homework assignments, but adds: "Now that I'm not in school I don't have to do that anymore."

YouTube, iTunes, OpenCourseWare - none are the full college experience. You can't raise your hand and ask a question. You can't get a letter of recommendation.

And most importantly, almost everywhere, you can't get credit or earn a degree.

That caveat, however, is what has made all this possible.

When the Internet emerged, experts predicted it would revolutionize higher education, cutting its tether to a college campus. Technology could help solve one of the fundamental challenges of the 21st century: providing a mass population with higher education at a time when a college degree was increasingly essential for economic success.

[beehive21-2009]

Great,education for those who can''t make it to a classroom and the price is right.Great adventures lurk for the future in education now everyone has a change to be educated,hope they give it a change.

One problem with online classes is that you don''t get to know your professors, they don''t know you, nor do you meet any of the other students in your class. I prefer online classes outside of my major, but I definitely want to be in a classroom for classes within my major. As the article mentions, it''s next to impossible to get a letter of recommendation if you''ve never met the prof.

[jjarden]

Online or "Distance" courses are as effective and challenging, if not more challenging than live, instructor-led classrooms. What most people do not realize is that Teachers/Professors are merely delivery devices for instructional content. No one NEEDS a live teacher, or NEEDS to be in a classroom. Learning is always an individual activity, and motivation is the most important factor in the learner. If you are motivated, you do not need a live teacher. Combine a motivated learner with properly designed instructional content with various learning strategies embedded and a "teacher" is completely unneccessary. If you''re not motivated, then a teacher can help facilitate your learning. For 100 years we have all thought that the classroom model of instruction with a teacher at the head of the classroom is the best model of learning...IT ISN''T, and Never has been. In fact, in most cases, especially in public high-schools across the country, it has been an utter disaster educationally.

[joyous88]

both systems are equally valid, and all persons are different, it may sound very nice to say that the classroom interaction is a required part of the university experience, but it is not true that it is required to be succesful at your professions, the clasroom experience is not for everybody, more on line degrees should be made available and they should carry equal weight.

I''ve taken quite a few online classes. I''ve enjoyed the convenience, but missed the interaction that a classroom provides. Definitely not for everyone - I see it more as a supplement than a replacement.

[xraytwonine]

This is interesting, but if it is ever implemented as a regular way of teaching, then we might just hit the same problem with education again.

Not everyone can learn on their own, and while education is becoming more and more like a 1-800 system, those who needs/desire real-time feedback is going to get left behind.

This whole virtual campus thing is happening everywhere, more than you think/know. I am here at San Jose, and I know our campus is already designing a prototype in which students are enrolled in a virtual world, take classes and tests in a virtual world and interact with the classmates virtually. In short, there will be no need for the classroom, the campus etc.

What does this really mean? I don''t know; is it good or bad, it''s too early to say, but with so much failure in 2007, I do hope people will seriously consider this more before labeling this the coming attraction of 2008.

Wow, this is awesome! They''ve got some great sounding classes!