Open Courseware and Online Learning: A Dynamic Flux

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has agreed to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s (MIT) OpenCourseWare community...MIT’s OpenCourseWare currently has over 250 universities onboard and the prominent members include Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; Yale University; Peking University; Harvard Law School; University of Notre Dame; Tufts University; University of California, Irvine and Utah State University. The consortium claims to have published materials from more than 13,000 courses in 20 languages, available through its website. MIT had reportedly invited IIT to join its OpenCourseWare consortium in 2007 but IIT had apparently declined the invitation then, stating that their initiatives are still young to join the Open Source learning bandwagon, as stated by TOI. _Source

Udemy is a new addition to the list of online open courseware providers. Some courses are free, and others require a fee. Udemy provides something called "The Faculty Project" which aims to provide a wide range of free university level courses to online learners, as well as providing a technology platform for professors to create new courses.

The infographic below, from onlinecollegecourses.com, provides a quick snapshot of the rapidly changing entity known as open courseware. A year from now, the entire project is likely to have grown appreciably.

Via: Online College Courses Blog

More sites for free video courses and lectures:

Freevideolectures.com

Academic Earth

Lecturefox

LearnersTV

Some emerging tech trends for online classes

Remember: Anything that moves education toward the open source model, is probably a good thing. Anything that moves education toward increasing dependency upon government and a highly centralised, top-down sanctioning of education, is probably a bad thing.