Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about the MIT's OpenCourseWare, an initiative that interests the participants of the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

The OpenCourseWare changes the education world because it makes course materials available on the Web, free of charge, and open to the educators and learners anywhere in the world. The concept was born in 2003 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began providing its courses online for free. OpenCourseWare allows self-learners to access high-quality knowledge for free, gives alumni a link to their school, provide educators with teaching materials, and enables prospective students to virtually get into university classrooms. The program is free and offers no reward other than knowledge.

In 2005, MIT and other higher education organizations formed the nonprofit OpenCourseWare Consortium with the objective to provide “free and open digital publication of high quality education materials, organized as a course.” As of mid-2008, more than 200 higher education institutions and organizations had joined up with the Consortium to offer courses ranging from art history to economics. The course content varies and may have a combination of lecture notes, quizzes, exams, video clips and audio lectures. The movement also includes its own YouTube channel, YouTube EDU, which hosts videos from more than 100 colleges and universities, as well as Academic Earth, which lists video lectures. Apple, too, with iTunes U, allows curious minds to download video and audio lectures to their iPods for learning on the go. What used to be expensive and inaccessible becomes convenient and accessible to everyone.

Making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free is a frank success. The OpenCourseWare Consortium boasts more than 100 million visits since its launch in 2006. The MIT OpenCourseWare alone, which provides 1,900 free courses oline, has recently published data (http://www.tofp.org/blog/?p=420) that show impressive numbers :

• More than 53.7 million individuals have now visited the MIT OpenCourseWare’s site & affiliated sites (1 million in April 2009 alone),
• OpenCourseware servers have now delivered over 3.1 billion files (“hits”) since launch,
• 8.5 million zip files of full course content have been downloaded from the site,
• 2.1 million OpenCourseWare videos have been downloaded from iTunes, with its videos viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube.

The competition between universities and technological improvements add up to education for anyone interested in learning. By making up-to-date educational content widely available, OpenCourseWare upgrades the level of standard education and focuses faculty efforts on teaching and learning on their campuses. The school expertise, the expert knowledge, will be crucial components of the future Business School model.

Ammie Eichenbaum, World Med MBA participant
Sources : Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Education-portal.com, The CS Monitor.