Back in the early days of public internet access, I started my cyberbali.com website about Bali, and then shortly afterwards, I began adding pages on web resources for teachers. As I incorporated more and more web-based resources into my teaching, I expanded the education pages to where they are now the main content on cyberbali.com. However, back in those days, educational resources were pretty much restricted to lesson plans, graphics, content such as written explanations of historical events for instance or, occasionally, java-based math activities. These days whole university courses are online. And not just courses where you can listen to a podcast of lectures, but videos of actual classroom lectures, and, even better, free classes that you can take for credit like the one that I am doing now on Udacity. Here are a few of the little gems for lifelong learners that I’ve just discovered.
The availability and variety of online courses seems to get better weekly. Just over the last few days I’ve come across the Harvard/MIT collaboration called edX. This organization is has been developed by Harvard and MI and will function to improve education at both campuses, but it is a separate entity. EdX will use an open-source learning platform. According to the edX website, these online classes will be free and open to anyone around the world who has access to the internet. Students who complete a course will be eligible for a certificate of completion although this certificate will not have the name of Harvard or MIT on it. While a complete list of available classes is not available at this time, the universities plan on offering a range of courses “across disciplines.”
Coursera is another online education resource put together by two Stanford computer science professors. They have 16 million dollars in venture capital and Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania are working with them as their academic partners. The Pedagogy page of the Coursera website says that research shows that a hybrid method of instruction where face-to-face learning is combined with online learning is more effective than either method use alone. I’ll discuss these issues in the next post.
Courses are interactive: students have use of interactive exercises and even the videos give students the opportunity to answer questions during the course of the video. Many assignments use peer assessment. The only problem that I see for me is that some courses require books that are a bit of a problem to obtain when living overseas.
Coursera already has classes online unlike edX. Computer and technology courses have already started. Classes in the Social Sciences and Humanities will be starting in June. For instance, Introduction to Sociology starts June 11 and lasts six weeks. There are no prerequisites for the class and all reading materials are open source. I’ve already signed up for this course to see what it’s like. Check out the website’s list of courses to see what is being offered and when.
Next post I’ll discuss some of the educational issues revolving around online education courses.
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