The New Yorker takes on the MOOC: “One of the edX people said, ‘This is being sponsored by Harvard and M.I.T. They wouldn’t do anything to harm higher education!’ What came to my mind was some cautious financial analysts saying, about some of the financial instruments that were being rolled out in the late nineties or early two-thousands, ‘This is risky stuff, isn’t it?’ And being told, ‘Goldman Sachs is doing it; Lehman Brothers is doing it.’ ” Previously
posted by oinopaponton on May 13, 2013 - 147 comments

Will online education dampen the college experience? Yes. Will it be worth it? Well... [more inside]
posted by latkes on Apr 3, 2013 - 39 comments

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy - about how online education startups are changing the notion and practice of higher education - by Clay Shirky (previously)
posted by davidjmcgee on Nov 18, 2012 - 61 comments

What's Wrong With Online Reading, a slide presentation by Randy Connolly, argues that the relatively recent and increasingly popular approach to reading and learning - on computers, tablets and smartphones instead of traditional print - influences what and how we read, research and think, with disturbing consequences.
posted by Schadenfreudian on Nov 5, 2012 - 50 comments

The University of Minnesota recently announced that its College of Education and Human Development has created a searchable online catalog of "open textbooks" that are reviewed by U of M faculty. The books must be Openly Licensed, complete (not a draft version of the text, or a collection of lecture notes), suitable for use outside of the author's institution, and available in print for a reasonable price, generally less than $40 USD. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Apr 24, 2012 - 14 comments

Coursera - free, online, introductory- to upper-undergraduate level classes in a wide variety of subjects, led by instructors from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Pennsylvania
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Apr 19, 2012 - 54 comments

Most of the prints in the exhibit "Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints" were designed simply to please the eye, but they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the world in which they lived. Although prints are often works of imagination (even when they are grounded in fact), they still have much to tell us about the time and place in which they were created. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Sep 30, 2011 - 10 comments

"Internet Essentials" is a $10/month internet plan available to any family with one child eligible for free lunches at American public schools. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad on Sep 20, 2011 - 108 comments

At the Bartos Theater, in conversation with Henry Jenkins, these speakers [Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein] don’t so much square off as share their hopes and fears for the emergence of online democracy. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation on Dec 6, 2010 - 7 comments

Free math courses online, from very basic to brainiac. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Feb 26, 2008 - 19 comments

10 Universities Offering Free Writing Courses Online.
posted by nickyskye on Jan 29, 2008 - 15 comments

10 Places to Get a Free Business Education Online
posted by nickyskye on Jan 2, 2008 - 12 comments

Librarian Chick is a blogger who has put together a wiki of literally hundreds of online learning sources with over twenty categories for "students, educators & anyone else who's hip to learning." [more inside]
posted by jonson on Sep 21, 2007 - 18 comments

Which abuse of the patent system are you? Take this test to find out. Now that they got it, they're beating distance learning colleges over the head with it, for money. Another obvious bit of programming turns lucrative for one company.
posted by mathowie on Mar 30, 2004 - 12 comments

The FBI is pushing for online ethics education in schools, but I wonder if it's even possible to teach good ethics in school anymore? It must be a great time to be a young geek: music is free, porn is plentiful, you can save anything on the web by simply right-clicking and choosing save as, you can easily trade and copy reports online, cracks and warez mean never having to pay for software or games again, hacking tools are freely available to anyone, and you can be male/female/old/young online and no one knows the difference. How could you possibly teach kids that all those are bad things?
posted by mathowie on Oct 10, 2000 - 12 comments