I like bargains, and there are some great ones out there in the area of online courses. These days, you can get entire degrees online, but I like the idea of taking a class online for free. But how good are free online courses? Can you really learn something?
To answer that, I first went looking first for free online offerings from English language universities. Three interesting schools with three very different approaches to "open learning" are:
- Carnie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative
- MITCourseWare
- Stanford on iTunes U
Next, I decided to actually sample their offerings, and see what they consisted of.
Carnie Mellon's OLI has a very appealing format. Their non-credit, interactive courses are offered in a number of different subject areas at for limited periods of time. I happened upon French Level I, and decided to sign up for it, as it is being offered January - June 2009.
The self-paced lessons include lots of multimedia, and a highly structured approach that is well thought out and well produced. This appears to be part of a larger educational research project on how people learn through interactive methods.
CMU's well-produced online French course even allows me to record myself speaking in French.
The MIT courses I looked at are more like compilations of course material previously offered MIT students in traditional classroom settings. The main takeaways here are the syllabi and the recommended readings. The class assignments didn't seem terribly compelling to me, because there is no feedback from the instructor, although I suppose if you're really motivated you might try them out and grade yourself. I tried out a course on Romantic Poetry originally offered in the Spring of 2005.
The recommended reading list has links to Amazon where you can buy your books. 10% of the proceeds from any book purchases go to the support of the OpenCoursWare project, which makes sense. If you want a good reading list on a subject matter of interest, check out MIOpenCourseWare.
The last place I tried for courses was Stanford on iTunes U. You basically can get - free of charge - a large number of recorded lectures produced by Stanford as MP3 files. I downloaded a few in the Fine Arts category. The problem I had with this arrangement is I don't really want all these files on my hard drive - I'd rather just listen to it. But that's just me. Some of these lectures might be good fare for a long car drive or a frequent commute. But 10 minutes into most audio lectures, I tend to space out, so for me it wasn't as compelling as I had hoped.
So far, the only learning experience that has held my attention is the Carnie Mellon OLI coursework. But I plan to keep looking...there is a larger list of schools experimenting in this space at: EducationPortal
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