A Public Education
There's a lot you can learn free on the Internet--if you know where to look
By Vicky Hallett
Take a Massachusetts Institute of Technology education, remove the Cambridge campus, the access to professors, the interaction with other students, the degree--and the $41,000-per-year price tag. What's left? MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu), a Web-based storehouse of syllabuses, readings, handouts, assignments, tests, and even some video lectures.
In other words: MIT free.
On portals like Columbia University's doomed Fathom.com, which shut down in March, freebies--if available at all--have been a way to lure future paying customers. But by September 30 of this year, 500 MIT courses in 33 disciplines were available for browsing--and nothing was for sale. MIT hopes to encourage other schools to join in an open exchange of ideas, "a worldwide Web of knowledge that will benefit mankind."
Not yet. Although no other university has followed suit, free Web-based learning opportunities continue to grow, especially those from museums and the educational television networks. In addition to the lectures and exhibits on its main site (www.si.edu), for example, the Smithsonian Institution last month launched smithso nianeducation. org, where teachers can pick out lesson plans, like "Under the Spell of . . . Spiders!" while kids can try out tutorials called IdeaLabs.
Free online tools have been a particular boon to parents. To teach her 13- and 16-year-olds, Kathleen Viglietta of Brookfield, Ill., uses the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory site (www.fnal.gov); its resources range from K-12 instructional materials to streaming video talks geared to older learners. Dan Stivers, who home-schools his daughters, 10-year-old Alyssia and 8-year-old Adriana, says he has fallen in love with OCW, especially a linear algebra class with Prof. Gilbert Strang. Although his kids are still years away from understanding most of the material, Stivers purchased Strang's textbook and is showing them some simple equations.
To Strang, extending the reach of his teaching is reward enough, and he is pleased that the Stivers family--as well as people from countries around the world--have access to his work. "I don't worry about the intellectual property," he says. "It's everybody's property."
There's a lot you can learn free on the Internet--if you know where to look
By Vicky Hallett
Take a Massachusetts Institute of Technology education, remove the Cambridge campus, the access to professors, the interaction with other students, the degree--and the $41,000-per-year price tag. What's left? MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu), a Web-based storehouse of syllabuses, readings, handouts, assignments, tests, and even some video lectures.
In other words: MIT free.
On portals like Columbia University's doomed Fathom.com, which shut down in March, freebies--if available at all--have been a way to lure future paying customers. But by September 30 of this year, 500 MIT courses in 33 disciplines were available for browsing--and nothing was for sale. MIT hopes to encourage other schools to join in an open exchange of ideas, "a worldwide Web of knowledge that will benefit mankind."
Not yet. Although no other university has followed suit, free Web-based learning opportunities continue to grow, especially those from museums and the educational television networks. In addition to the lectures and exhibits on its main site (www.si.edu), for example, the Smithsonian Institution last month launched smithso nianeducation. org, where teachers can pick out lesson plans, like "Under the Spell of . . . Spiders!" while kids can try out tutorials called IdeaLabs.
Free online tools have been a particular boon to parents. To teach her 13- and 16-year-olds, Kathleen Viglietta of Brookfield, Ill., uses the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory site (www.fnal.gov); its resources range from K-12 instructional materials to streaming video talks geared to older learners. Dan Stivers, who home-schools his daughters, 10-year-old Alyssia and 8-year-old Adriana, says he has fallen in love with OCW, especially a linear algebra class with Prof. Gilbert Strang. Although his kids are still years away from understanding most of the material, Stivers purchased Strang's textbook and is showing them some simple equations.
To Strang, extending the reach of his teaching is reward enough, and he is pleased that the Stivers family--as well as people from countries around the world--have access to his work. "I don't worry about the intellectual property," he says. "It's everybody's property."
