2012- The Year of Open Courseware

As we near the end of 2011, I reflect on the fact that many high school students will soon be embarking on their journey to college. They have painstakingly worked their way through twelve years of public school for the sole purpose of receiving a piece of paper that demonstrates that they can successfully regurgitate "facts" to their school district's satisfaction. From there, many of them will choose to pursue a four year degree, and perhaps even graduate school after. Others may choose to crawl their way up from the bottom rung of the societal ladder, working minimum wage jobs until their department overseer decides that he or she has proven him or herself worthy enough to join the ranks of the corporate elite. Still others may rise above the system, and redefine it by their own terms, perpetuating their name into immortality. There are those that may embark on a path of self destruction, and those who may embark on a path of self sacrifice. Regardless of the instrument of one's path through life, one truth remains abundantly clear; scientia est potentia.


Confused? Don't be. The phrase above is a Latin phrase that simply means "knowledge is power". It is something that those that I've looked up to have always emphasized. But it begs to question: Just what is the cost of the pursuit of knowledge? The world of academia would have you pay thousands of dollars, and plunge yourself into debt and despair in the name of the pursuit of knowledge; however, we all know that knowledge and the pursuit thereof is, and always has been, free to those who seek it. Thanks to the advent of the social network, learning can be achieved in ways that our parents and grandparents could only begin to imagine.


Enter the world of the Open Courseware Consortium, a massive conglomeration of educational institutions with a single goal in mind, feeding the pursuit of knowledge free of charge. Thanks to OCWC there are now entire degree programs available from some of the most prestigious universities in the world to audit free of charge. The following is a sample list of courses that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers through OCWC:

I chose MIT because of their prestige, but also because of the fact they have helped to spearhead this new era of open courseware. The Internet has exploded with open courseware resources, and now MIT has chosen to take this to the next logical level with its announcement of MITx which will allow users to earn certificates opposed to just auditing courses. You can read more about MITx HERE


In addition to the institutional movement towards open courseware, there is also a massive social movement towards the open learning environment. A prime example of this is "Khan Academy", a website whose video library boasts more than 2,700 videos covering a broad variety of subjects that you can watch completely for free. Moreover, Khan Academy offers practice exercises, and even awards badges and achievements to registered users and yes, registration is also COMPLETELY free. Here's a sample lesson from Khan Academy explaining diffusion and osmosis:





Thanks to social networking we now spend more than six hours of our day online. Perhaps social learning will encourage us to spend at least half of that time in the pursuit of that most valuable commodity, knowledge.