Orange you glad you decided to be social?
Free University courses on the Internet - how should OSU respond?
An article in CNN online news today, Welcome to the University of iTunes, details how hundreds of universities and business schools (including OSU) are offering recordings of their lectures, seminars and conferences free to the general public via iTunes University, YouTube EDU, Academic Earth, MIT Open Courseware, and Open Courseware Consortium.
I did a search for "social media" and came up with the following results: YouTube EDU offered more than 68,900 videos on Social Media. Academic Earth offered 151 videos on Social Media; and MIT Open Courseware included more than 1,000 results for social media.
OPEN Courseware Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions from all over the world. Using its search engine, I found 519 actual courses available on social media.
On iTunes University, I found a course from Yale University called, Using Social Media to Grow a Company, and another from UMBC on Social Entrepreneurship.
All these classes can be downloaded to your iPhone, which means you can study them anywhere and at any time. And, its all FREE! The CNN articles said that University of Oxford has had more than one million downloads from its offerings so far.
My question is: how will this affect colleges around the world? In the CNN article, Vanessa Klein, a French business school's project manager for iTunes U, said that making the information available is "a great way to promote the business school."
Do you think these free university courses are going to positively or negatively affect colleges in general? How? Who do you think will be the most likely user of these course offerings? Would you use them? Why? How should OSU respond? What courses should OSU offer and why?
I did a search for "social media" and came up with the following results: YouTube EDU offered more than 68,900 videos on Social Media. Academic Earth offered 151 videos on Social Media; and MIT Open Courseware included more than 1,000 results for social media.
OPEN Courseware Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions from all over the world. Using its search engine, I found 519 actual courses available on social media.
On iTunes University, I found a course from Yale University called, Using Social Media to Grow a Company, and another from UMBC on Social Entrepreneurship.
All these classes can be downloaded to your iPhone, which means you can study them anywhere and at any time. And, its all FREE! The CNN articles said that University of Oxford has had more than one million downloads from its offerings so far.
My question is: how will this affect colleges around the world? In the CNN article, Vanessa Klein, a French business school's project manager for iTunes U, said that making the information available is "a great way to promote the business school."
Do you think these free university courses are going to positively or negatively affect colleges in general? How? Who do you think will be the most likely user of these course offerings? Would you use them? Why? How should OSU respond? What courses should OSU offer and why?
Comment
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Comment by Rachel Newton on October 21, 2009 at 1:55pm - After paying tuition at OSU for four years, anything with the word FREE sounds AMAZING! I liked the tag of "itunes University". It caught my eye immediately and now I'm having to think about how much of a possibility this really is. I'm not sure what I think about it. I think its great that we can offer a free, quality education using itunes and other related avenues; but, is it really accomplishing the goal of creating educated individuals or are we just catering to the "get a degree without trying hard" generations. Great post though. Very interesting and I bet this will come up in a conversation I have sometime this week.
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Comment by Charles Michael Pelfrey Jr. on October 19, 2009 at 11:33am - I believe these courses offered for free by the universities will give prospective students a taste of what is available. They can get an idea what the curriculum is and what the professors expect. It is possible for many classes to take advantage of this at OSU, especially the ones that are already online. I doubt any schools will offer course credit for free, though.
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