02/04/2010

Online courses: good for the brain & wallet

Technology seems to follow a pattern. At first, when things become available for free, people wring their hands and predict the demise of an industry. Then, it turns out that making stuff available for free somehow doesn't make any difference - or if it does, then it's a positive one. Remember when it happened with music? File sharers were going to kill the music industry. Then it turned out that file sharing hadn't hit legitimate sales at all (and in some age groups, it actually boosted them). Now, it seems as if the same is happening with free courseware.

A study by Salt Lake City's Brigham Young University has found that granting free access to long-distance learning courses didn't affect paid enrollments at all. It made six courses available, and then found that they bought in 445 students over a period of four months. According to the study, it had no adverse effects on enrollments, and may possibly have improved them (although apparently they aren't adding any more courses, because it cost too much money).

Open courseware is becoming increasingly popular. MIT published its first open courses in 2002. There are now many universities offering their own content (you can see a list here). And of course iTunes U hosts hours of audio and video content.

Of course, you don't get credit with these classes. But you do get to feed your head. While you're at it, you might want to consider some other online assets that are good for your grey matter:

Videolectures.net
Fora.tv
100 free science documentaries online
Ted Talks

Anyone got any others? Please help us all to expand our smarts, and post them here.

Danny Bradbury, MSN Tech & Gadgets

Posted at 04:29 PM in Apple, Web/Tech | Permalink