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.

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 introducing in more details the Business Schools 2.0 workshop happening at Lift France.
Authors: Boris Bartikowski, Associate Professor of Marketing at Euromed Management and Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business, St Louis University

In recent research that we conducted in this field we argued that three interrelated Global Megatrends, namely Globalization, Rise of Networks and Open Innovation, are facilitated by the global expansion of the Web. Looking at these three Global Megatrends can help anticipating some challenges that business schools may face in the future.

Globalization comes along with convergence and integration. Globalization leads in many instances to increased standardization of social and economic interrelationships. Coincidentally, globalization leads to increased cultural flow, cultural multipolarity and growing global workforce. Business schools are at the crossroad of this development. They strive to establish global market presence, and to strengthen their position through international partnerships. One of the challenges they are facing is to create economies of scale through standardization in an environment that requires culturally sensitive dialogues and that values offerings that are adapted to the local needs of diverse stakeholders.

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 by Euromed Management's Michel Gutsatz about rethinking business schools.

"Here You will See the World through Different Eyes"

The Euromed Management signature was chosen a few years ago because we wanted to tell the business world that our responsibility was to open new perspectives for our students. We stand for diversity & for complexity, we mix globalization & localization AND we train international, responsible leaders & entrepreneurs.
This vision has led us to develop within the School an Innovation School - where students can learn, exchange virtually. It led us to partner with numerous Business Schools abroad and offer our students the possibility to work & learn throughout the world.

It now leads us a step further, to questions like:
- can we imagine a School without walls?
- can we build a School where students spend most of the time in corporations or NGOs or any place where they wish to build their professional career?
- what place for technology in this project?

These questions have led us to Lift, the first brick in the wall of this Business School 2.0, maybe a school without walls?!?

Recently I interviewed Nicolas Nova, editorial manager of LIFT, at the Mobile City Conference in Rotterdam, NL. The topics covered in this interview are: The future of education and learning, blended-learning, remote-accessed field trips, communication, collaboration, the changing roles of teachers & professors, surveillance, privacy and The Lift Conference. I was very impressed with Nicolas's reflections on the topics mentioned above and I make this interview available to the lift community in order to inspire thought and discussion on the topics Nicolas addresses.

An enhanced podcast can be obtained here: http://www.mamk.net/?p=727