A Very Educational Post

It seems that the internet has brought forward new crowd-sourcing opportunities for educators. www.thefreeuniversity.com is a new website that has grabbed my attention. The site is still under construction, but it seems they have plans to create a full open source area for lectures and texts to let people interested in learning any subjects to have the opportunity to simply search for it and watch a few lectures. MIT has been doing a similar thing for a few of their courses for years, where they record entire lectures and upload them to websites, such as YouTube or their own website, which can be found at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/. However, MIT does ask for donations to keep the service up and running, which surprised me that a university as big as MIT was having trouble funding the recording and storage of lectures. That is why thefreeuniversity.com may be more successful in collecting more full course lectures, since they do plan on being community-operated.


There are lots of places on the internet that offer free lectures and tutorials aside from universities themselves. YouTube itself has become a big source of educational how-to videos and academic tutorials. There are even people that are able to make somewhat of a living from posting free tutorial videos about various subjects, such as Khan Academy, thenewboston, patrickjmt, and the list goes on. I've found many of these free tutorials helpful while studying for university subjects myself. This process doesn't threaten the existence of big institutions, yet it helps people become more educated and well-rounded. I've certainly learned a lot more by researching random topics on the internet, than from taking breadth requirement courses at U of T. Self-motivated learners are definitely the best future professionals, which is why it's becoming increasingly important to become dedicated to a single field. Technology is what's closing that gap between self-motivated learners and professionals. Wikipedia would not be as successful without the support of those that are motivated enough to share information and fund the website. Online degrees are still too early to become credible enough, but in the future, there may be a good amount of variety from one type of university to another that people are judged by their skills, not their location of study.