This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles about Open Courseware and online learning. They point out that while free access to quality learning materials is a great idea, few people are going to go through these materials just for the joy of learning. Most people need some kind of credentials. The bigger issue is cost -- open courses cost money to develop and put online, and in bad economic times, that money has dried up. The future of open courseware using the current model doesn't look good.
Personally, while I like the idea of being able to find quality course materials and use them freely, much of the stuff I've seen from Open Courseware sites has not been very usable. Sure, it's free, but I am not clear on who really benefits from these efforts. Putting your courses online may serve as a recruiting tool or generate good publicity, but do these materials really get used by others? That's what's unclear to me. The UK Open University's Open Learn effort provides courses in a variety of formats, including as Moodle archives. This makes it very easy to put the courses online, but even so, the motivation to go through such courses has to be high for anyone to really make use of them. The Chronicle does detail a few people who have found some of the Open Courseware videos useful as supplements to other courses. Maybe this is an effective way to use them.
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