Virtual education… for free
AFP via Yahoo News
WASHINGTON (AFP) – They don’t offer degrees but then they don’t charge tuition either.
Colleges and universities across the United States are offering free courses online on virtually every subject imaginable, including videotaped lectures by some of their most distinguished professors.
Video-sharing site YouTube recently created a hub called YouTube EDU at youtube.com/edu for the more than 100 US colleges and universities offering free online learning.
Among the thousands of videos on YouTube EDU are the celebrated classroom theatrics of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics professor Walter Lewin, whose clips have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Other leading institutions of higher education posting videos to YouTube include the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.
Interested in dentistry? Then the YouTube channel of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry may be the place for you, serving up a total of 426 videos.
The courses offered on YouTube EDU are free and not for credit but the number of schools offering online classes which count towards a degree is booming.
According to a November 2008 study done for the Sloan Consortium, more than 3.9 million students in the United States were taking at least one online course in 2007, the latest year for which full statistics were available.
That was a 12 percent increase over the previous year, according to Sloan, a non-profit whose mission is to “integrate online education into the mainstream of higher education.”