Monday, May 07, 2012

Nerd News: Hahvahd and MIT to Offer Free Online Classes

It's a $60 million initiative to offer free online courses to anyone who wants them.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is pretty cool. There are already a lot of online learning materials that people can access for free, as you blogged about before. With the internet you can learn about anything you are curious enough to google.

To me, the missing pieces are mentorship, accountability, and determination/persistence and perhaps recognition.

After high school no one forces you to go to school so it depends on a person's determination and persistence. This is especially true where the learning is all self guided in the absence of any of the ritual, authority, or social structure that comes with going to school.

Very few people can learn on their own. I see a lot of stuck up educated people who look down on others with less education but they didn't get their on their own. People had to teach them. Everyone learns better with a mentor or someone who provides feedback and holds the student accountable.

The trick to making what MIT and Harvard want to do successful, will be pairing the online content with mentors, feedback, accountability, and recognition.

In our society, you can say you learned whatever you want. You might even be able to take a test to show that you know what you say you do. But we need some sort of recognition that a third party recognizes you learned what you say you did.

- Wodun