100 Suoer tools for learning and teaching - source www..onlineschools.org

Most educators hope that their teaching touches students in exciting ways so that the information conveyed makes an impact. One sure way to engage students is to make their educational experience fun. New teachers just starting out as well as experienced teachers who could use a breath of fresh air in their curriculum will love all the great tools available on the Internet to help make their teaching more entertaining. Some of the following tools will have teachers and students exploring wikis, open courseware, Twitter, blogging, comics, videos, and incorporating plenty of other tools that will help make learning fun.

Wikis

Wikis offer a great way to collaborate and share knowledge. Some of these are just for teachers and others are for students, too.

1. GoAPES. This wiki is for secondary and college-level teachers of Environmental and Earth Science, Geology, and Oceanography. There is an extensive listing of projects, networks, and resources here.
2. Salute to Seuss. PreK to 6th grade classrooms created a project based on a specific Dr. Seuss book and posted it on this wiki. While it is no longer active, it is full of great ideas for teachers.
3. Welker’s Wikinomics. Economics students can use this wiki to enhance their education and are also invited to contribute to the wiki.
4. eToolBox. This wiki is an excellent resource for teachers seeking ideas and tools for integrating technology into their lessons.
5. Kidpedia. An online encyclopedia written for kids and by kids, Kidpedia is a great example of an awesome hands-on opportunity for students.
6. Flat Classroom Project 2008. This is the third year for this project that promotes global communication and collaboration.
7. Horizon Project 2008. A sister project to Flat Classroom Project, Horizon Project also offers opportunities for connections with other classrooms around the world.
8. Digitally Speaking. Digitally Speaking offers resources and ideas for teachers to use free tools to enhance their classrooms with technology in innovative ways.
9. Educational Origami. This wiki is part of a project to bring 21st century teaching and learning into the classroom.
10. Salk’s Periodic Table. On the home page, this looks like a common periodic table. Clicking on each of the elements opens up a new page with information about that element. Use this in your science class or as a model for your class to create something similar.
11. WikiEducator. This wiki is dedicated to opening up education and teachers to free content through the Open Education Resources Foundation.

Open Courseware

Open courseware provides content from real college-level courses that is available free of charge online. These classes vary widely by subject and offer interesting content for all levels of learners.

12. MIT OpenCourseWare. Both teachers and students can access almost 2,000 college courses that can be implemented into their classes. MIT also offers a section especially for high school students called Highlights for High Schools.
13. Open UW. University of Washington offers a handful of classes that include mostly history and literature.
14. UC Berkeley Webcasts. UC Berkeley offers audio recordings of many classes being offered each semester as well as archived recordings from past classes.
15. Notre Dame OpenCourseWare. Check out the selection of liberal arts classes available here.
16. Open Learning Initiative. Carnegie Mellon offers several classes in their open courseware section.
17. The UMass Boston OpenCourseWare. Give the classes at University of Massachusetts Boston a try. Most of their classes focus on math and sciences.
18. Tufts OpenCourseWare. Life sciences are the bulk of the free courses available at Tufts University.
19. Utah State OpenCourseWare. Browse through the wide variety of open courseware classes offered at Utah State University.
20. Open Yale Courses. Yale offers introductory courses in subjects ranging from astronomy to literature.
21. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health OpenCourseWare. Johns Hopkins offers free public health courses with topics such as health policy and global health.
22. Stanford Engineering Everywhere. Tech savvy students will enjoy the computer science, artificial intelligence, and electrical engineering classes at Stanford.

Blogging

These blogging tools will help get you and your class started on fun adventures in the blogosphere.

23. Blogging Basics: Creating Student Journals on the Web. This tutorial covers all the basics to get you up to speed on classroom blogging.
24. Class Blogmeister. Designed specifically for educators, this free service allows you to create a class blog and find other blogs by grade level, state, or country. Due to the safety features on this platform, this service is rarely blocked by school filters.
25. Edublogs. Also made just for educators, this blogging platform provides lots of features and short, simple URLs for the blogs that make them easy to share with parents.
26. Blogger. Blogger is teamed up with Google and has easy to use blogs that you can set up with little tech knowledge.
27. WordPress. The free WordPress blogs provide access to tons of tools such as spellcheck, integrated stats tracker, and spam protection.
28. 21Classes. Set up classroom homepages and host and manage blogs for your students or let students host their own blogs with this free service.
29. ClustrMaps. ClustrMaps tracks the geographic location of visitors that appear as dots on a world map.
30. Classtools.net. Create Flash-animated games, activities, or diagrams that you can integrate into your class blog.
31. Gickr. This tool lets you create a photo slide show easily and without using Flash that you can add to any blog or social network.

Twitter Tools

Twitter has caught on in academic circles as a powerful tool in education. Use these free tools to use Twitter with your classes.

32. Atlas. Use this tool to see a map of tweets in an interactive geography lesson.
33. TwitterLocal. Zero in on a specific geographic location to find out what people are tweeting about in that place.
34. Twitxr. A great way to document a project on your Twitter feed, use this tool to send photos from a mobile phone to your Twitter feed.
35. TwitPic. Students can view photos from all around the world for a first-hand look at places far beyond the classroom.
36. Outwit Me. Let students play these fun and educational Twitter games in class.
37. twiggit. This tool combines Digg with Twitter and is a great way for students to find interesting news articles.
38. QuoteURL. If your class is creating a project with several different tweets, use this tool to put them together on one page.
39. TweetScan. A great alternative to search Twitter, type keywords into this tool and have tweets that match your keywords emailed to you.
40. Tweetizen. Start your own group of Twitter users or connect with a group already going strong. This is an excellent way to find experts in a specific field.
41. Twrivia. Get a daily trivia question with this Twitter tool.
42. Plinky. Each day this app provides a prompt in the form of a question or challenge. Have students reply by posting text, photos, maps, or images in response to the prompt.
43. @EarthquakeNews. This twitter feed is provided by the USGS Earthquake Center and sends tweets on any earthquake that hits around the world and registers over 2.5.
44. twittories. Students can practice storytelling when they participate in this project that asks each person to add 140 characters to contribute to the ongoing story.
45. twitterbookgroup. Have students take part of this book group or model one of your own after this one where a book is posted each month and participants leave their thoughts on the book in a tweet.
46. Edmodo. If you haven’t already embraced Twitter, use this private microblog similar to Twitter that is designed especially for teachers and students.

Teaching with Comics

Using comics in the classroom is a great way to reach students and make your teaching more entertaining. Check out websites such as Comics in the Classroom for great ideas on how you can use these tools to create engaging lessons.

47. Comic Creator. Supply the information you want in this tool that provides people, animals, thought and speech bubbles, props, and backdrops.
48. Howtoons. These comics from Instructables are specifically for teaching children how to do stuff. Let students use these cartoons to learn how to do projects or use them as a role for students creating their own how-to comics.
49. Tech Module: Using Comic Life in the Classroom. Learn how to use Comic Life, an inexpensive comic generator, in the classroom with this tutorial that also includes tons of fun lesson plans from several outside resources.
50. Pixton. Opt to let students create their own individual comic strip or try the free trial of Pixton for Schools for a class project.
51. Make Beliefs Comix. This tool allows students to create comic strips with lots of options for customizing their strips and plenty of teacher resources too.
52. Bitstrip. Let students create their own comics or browse through other people’s comics posted at this site.
53. ArtisanCam. Students can also create comics with this tool as well as other art projects.
54. BeFunky. Have students use digital photos to turn them into digital comics with this tool.
55. Comiqs. Use ready-made templates or design your own images with this cartoon generator that creates a slide show with the results.
56. PikiKids. Students upload images, then choose their layout, add speech bubbles, and more to create their own comics.

Educational Videos

Incorporating video into your lessons allows students to connect with the outside world without leaving the classroom. These sites all provide excellent educational videos for free.

57. TeacherTube. The videos here are made by and for educators.
58. Nova Teachers Watch Video Online. Teachers can choose short videos (under 15 minutes) from NOVA’s magazine-style series to enhance lessons or choose longer videos (1-3 hours) from their programs for a more complete lesson.
59. Teacher’s Domain. This site provides video and audio segments from PBS programming.
60. TED. These videos feature inspirational talks by fascinating people from all walks of life.
61. Teachers TV Videos. This site from the UK hosts a wealth of educational videos.
62. Learner.org. This site promotes quality teaching with videos for teachers, most of which are free.
63. iMovie in Teacher Education. Watch four movies that show how teachers incorporate digital video in their classroom instruction.
64. TEACH. This documentary follows four first-year teachers working in some of the toughest schools.
65. YouTube EDU. Visit this specific branch of YouTube devoted to videos related to education.

Tools to Make Writing Fun

Writing can be difficult for many students, but these tools are great for drawing out creativity and the awesome power of words.

66. Big Huge Thesaurus. Use this site as a reference source to look up synonyms, antonyms, and rhymes, then get blog post ideas and story plot ideas too.
67. Visual Thesaurus. This tool maps out synonyms and offers a fresh way to explore words with related connotations.
68. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Thirteen Writing Prompts. This tool offers a variety of different prompts ranging from ending sentences of a short story to writing about specific scenarios.
69. Creative Writing Prompts. Get over 300 writing prompts that range from writing about physical objects to specific memories to creating a poem.
70. Imagination Prompt Generator. Have students browse through these prompts or use the first one that comes up.
71. Writer’s Digest – Writing Prompts. With pages and pages of writing prompts available here, you and your students won’t run out of ideas to jumpstart writing.
72. Writing Prompts. Click the button to get a random selection of writing prompts with this tool.
73. WritingFix: The Daily Prompt Generator. Students can get questions that leads to writing prompts with this interactive writing prompt generator.
74. Portrait of Words: Writing Challenge Photo Prompts. Writers are invited to view a set of photographs posted on this blog and are challenged to create a story around them. Photos change each month.
75. Writing Prompt Generator. Select from one of the three buttons to generate different prompts to spark creativity.
76. About.com Creative Writing Prompts. If you need more writing prompts, visit this page that lists several links to ideas and writing prompt generators.

Fun Tools for Students

Students will love these great tools that range from learning the history of stories to creating a map of a persuasive argument to an interactive periodic table.

77. Dynamic Periodic Table. This interactive periodic table provides students with fun and easy access to detailed information on each element.
78. Online Etymology Dictionary. Let students discover the interesting and entertaining origins and history of common words and phrases.
79. Awesome Stories. Find original sources from national archives, libraries, universities, museums, and government databases for awesome stories.
80. Gliffy. Create sharp, professional looking flow charts, diagrams, drawings, and more with this tool.
81. Glogster. The entire class can work on multimedia projects with this tool.
82. Create a Graph. Students can easily create a pie, bar, line, area, or XY graph that they can print or save.
83. Grow a Tree. When it’s time to study family, using this family tree generator makes it fun for students to show off their family members.
84. Persuation Map. Map out an argument for a debate or persuasive essay with this tool.

Professional Networks

Connect with other teachers to discover fun teaching tips while also expanding your professional and social network.

85. Classroom 2.0. Join this active professional networking site to learn about web 2.0 and collaborative technology in education.
86. Passionate Teachers. Share ideas, strategies, and resources with these teachers who feel passionately about their work and promoting quality education.
87. Edutagger. Find interesting articles and tag them to share with other teachers or browse other educators’ finds.
88. NextGen Teachers. This organization supports teachers making positive changes in education through technology.
89. Education Leadership. Education Leadership offers a place for educators to discuss what makes effective leaders in education.
90. The Schools United. This professional networking site brings schools around the globe together in order to collaborate, communicate, and share resources.
91. TeachAde. You can connect with other teachers as well as find resources for professional development at this online networking site.

Sites Offering Great Ideas and Inspiration

Be sure to check out the resources and ideas available at these awesome sites that are made exclusively for teachers and students.

92. Discovery Education. Find a plethora of classroom resources aw well as resources for students to use at home on Discovery Education’s site.
93. Edutopia. This site is packed with inspiration for teachers and students, including articles, blogs, videos, and much more.
94. Google for Educators. Google hosts lots of tools, opportunities, news, and more to help promote quality education.
95. National Geographic Education. This site offers resources and programs for educators and students.
96. Smithsonian Education. Get resources tailored to your geographic location, grade level, or subject with lesson plans, field trips, professional development, and much more from the Smithsonian.
97. Creative Teaching. This site is dedicated to helping teachers create creative and effective lessons.
98. Adventures of CyberBee. Find plenty of ideas here from treasure hunts to web projects with the projects on this site that are directed to younger learners.
99. Scholastic Teachers. This popular site provides teaching resources, activities for students, and information on Scholastic books and authors.
100. TEAMS Educational Resources. This site offers a wealth of projects to inspire teachers and is organized in an easy-to-use fashion.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

Log into virtual labs for real experiments

iLabs Will Allow Students To Perform Tests Anywhere, Anytime Via Webcam, Remote Controls

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have received a $1 million grant to take the concept of online laboratories, or iLabs, and put them into high schools.

iLabs are experimental facilities that can be accessed through the internet, allowing students to complete experiments from anywhere at any time via a webcam and remote controls. But the labs are not to be confused with the virtual world. The high-tech equipment is real and yields real scientific data.

“Students are always online and very tech-savvy now,” Kemi Jona, director of the Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships (OSEP) at Northwestern University and the project’s lead author, said. “So the fact that they don’t get to touch the device doesn’t faze them at all.”

To integrate iLabs into regular high school science curricula, Jona hopes to turn the website into a hub where students and educators can go to find, share, and access facilities, similar to an eBay-type marketplace.

Right now, the nine instruments available on the site include an inverted pendulum at the University of Queensland in Australia and several at MIT: a microelectronics device characterization lab, a dynamic signal analyzer, an educational laboratory virtual instrumentation suite, a polymer crystallization experiment, a shake table, a heat exchanger, a force on a dipole lab, and neutron spectroscopy labs.

Jona has begun testing instruments in the class of Mark Vondracek, who teaches advanced physics in Illinois. His class was able to use iLabs to access a Geiger counter and measure a radioactive source to complete an experiment in radioactivity.

Northwestern University will put some of its devices online starting this year and will conduct a formal pilot test of iLabs in fall 2009 with teachers and students around the country.

“The fact that you can control it from 8,000 miles away is cool,” Vondracek said. “You can’t do true science within a classroom environment anyhow. Nowadays people don’t have the time or the facilities.” The researcher hopes that once iLabs are made a permanent part of the classroom, they will help students learn to think more like scientists.

Jona hopes that iLabs will help close the gap between schools with many facilities to share and those with less to work with. He is bringing iLabs to the Chicago Public School system and other school districts that lack resources.

“My vision is to level the playing field in terms of providing better and more equal access for students regardless of where they live. There’s already some work going on with iLabs in Africa where there really are few resources available,” he said. “Ultimately, I hope to create a worldwide resource that brings more students into science and scientific careers”. AGENCIES

UK schools swap history for blogging, Wikipedia

British children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian reported on Wednesday.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must accumulate before they are 11 to allow schools greater flexibility in what they teach.

The plans have been drawn up by Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief who was appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, and are due to be published next month.

The papers seen by the Guardian are draft plans for the detailed content of each of six core “learning areas” that Rose is proposing should replace the current 13 standalone subject areas.

The proposals require:

Kids to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker besides how to spell.

Children to be able to place historical events within a chronology.

Less emphasis on the use of calculators than in the current curriculum.

An understanding of physical development, health and wellbeing, which would address what Rose calls “deep societal concerns” about children’s health, diet and physical activity, as well as their relationships with family. They will be taught about peer pressure, how to deal with bullying and how to negotiate in relationships. AGENCIES

UK mulls tracking networking sites

London: The government was accused of excessive snooping on Wednesday over proposals to monitor social networking sites as part of an anti-terror strategy.

Networking sites, which are thought to have millions of British members, could be forced to log data on everyone their users make contact with on their sites, according to a report on the government proposals in the Independent.

The moves follow controversial proposals, under EU directives, to store information on phone calls made, emails sent and websites visited in Britain. The information could be added to a planned database to track terror plots.

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said the directives did not include the social networking sites, and the government was looking at closing the loophole.

Coaker made the comments earlier this month at a little noticed Commons committee to examine the EU directives which date back to the 2005 London bombings. AFP

WEB WORLD

Admissions open: Virtual varsity just a click away

Tamar Lewin

An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

“The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” said the entrepreneur, Shai Reshef, founder of several internet-based educational businesses.

“The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free,” Reshef said. “We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an internet connection.”

About four million students in the United States took at least one online course in 2007, according to a survey by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group devoted to integrating online learning into mainstream higher education. Online learning is growing in many different contexts.

Through the Open Courseware Consortium, started in 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities around the world have posted materials for thousands of courses —as varied as Lambing and Sheep Management at Utah State and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory at MIT — all free to the public. Many universities now post their lectures on iTunes.

For-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University have extensive online offerings. And increasingly, both public and private universities offer at least some classes online.

Outside the US, too, online learning is booming. Open University in Britain, for example, enrolls about 160,000 undergraduates in distance-learning courses.

The University of the People, like other internet-based universities,would have online study communities, weekly discussion topics, homework assignments and exams. But in lieu of tuition, students would pay only nominal fees for enrollment ($15 to $50) and exams ($10 to $100), with students from poorer countries paying the lower fees and those from richer countries paying higher ones. Reshef plans to start small, limiting enrollment at 300 students when the university goes online in the fall and offering only bachelor’s degrees in business administration and computer science. NYT NEWS SERVICE

READING ONLINE

Don’t buy the costly textbook, download it for free

Noam Cohen

Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.

It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost. “The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always OK to add $5.”

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.

“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

His volume, ‘Introduction to Economic Analysis’, is being used at some colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, a private college in Claremont, California. And that is a big difference between textbook publishers and the drug makers. Sure, there have been scientists with McAfee’s attitude — Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine and scoffed: “Could you patent the sun?”

For the textbook makers, however, it is a different story. McAfee allows anyone to download a Word file or PDF of his book, while also taking advantage of the growing marketplace for print on demand.

A broader effort to publish free textbooks is called Connexions, the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University. Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Teachers put up material, called “modules,” and then mix and match their work with others’ to create material for students. NYT NEWS SERVICE

The Future of Webucation! - Economic Times - 30/12/2007

All the world’s a college

Net Effect: Free Lecture Downloads By Elite Colleges Provide Access To World-Class Education

Justin Pope BOSTON

GILBERT Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He has written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course. Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach. An MIT initiative called ‘OpenCourseWare’ makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free — lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang’s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 million times since June alone.

In his Istanbul dormitory, Kemal Burcak Kaplan, an undergraduate at Bogazici University, downloads Strang’s lectures to try to boost his grade in a class there. Outside Calcutta, graduate student Sriram Chandrasekaran uses them to brush up on matrices for his engineering courses at the Indian Institute of Technology. Many ‘students’ are college teachers themselves, like Sheraz ali Khan at a small engineering institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Noorali Jiwaji, at the Open University of Tanzania. They use Strang and other MIT professors as guides to design their own classes, and direct students to MIT’s courses for help. Others are closer to MIT’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus. Some are MIT students and alumni, while others have no connection at all — like Gus Whelan, a retiree on nearby Cape Cod, and Dustin Darcy, a 27-year-old video game programmer in Los Angeles who uses linear algebra regularly in his work.
“Rather than going through my old, dusty books,” Darcy said, “I thought I might as well go through it from the top and see if I learn something new.”There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious. The world’s top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they are arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information.

MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow. As with many technology trends, new services and platforms are driving change. Last spring marked the debut of ‘iTunes U’, a section of Apple’s popular music and video downloading service now publicly hosting free material from 28 colleges. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley recently announced it would be the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. Berkeley was already posting lectures, but YouTube has dramatically expanded their reach.

If there is not yet something for everyone, it is only a matter of time. On iTunes,
popular recent downloads include a climate change panel at Stanford, lectures on existentialism by Cal-Berkeley professor Hubert Dreyfus, and a performance of Mozart’s requiem by the Duke Chapel Choir. Berkeley’s offerings include 48 classes, from ‘Engineering Thermodynamics’ to ‘Human Emotion’. “It’s almost as good as being there,” said Whelan, the Massachusetts retiree, of the MIT classes he has sampled. “The only thing that’s lacking is the pressure.” He says he usually doesn’t do the homework assignments, but adds: “Now that I’m not in school I don’t have to do that anymore.”

YouTube, iTunes, OpenCourseWare — none are the full college experience. You cannot raise your hand and ask a question. You cannot get a letter of recommendation. And most importantly, almost everywhere, you cannot get credit or earn a degree. That caveat, however, is what has made all this possible. When the internet emerged, experts predicted it would revolutionise higher education, cutting its tether to a college campus. Technology could help solve one of the fundamental challenges of the 21st century: providing a mass population with higher education at a time when a college degree was increasingly essential for economic success.
Today, the internet has indeed transformed higher education. A multibilliondollar industry, both for-profit and nonprofit, has sprung up offering online training and degrees. Figures from the Sloan

Consortium, an online learning group, report about 3.5 million students are signed up for at least one online course — or about 20% of all students at degree-granting institutions.
But it has not been as clear what role — if any — elite universities would play in what experts call the ‘massification’ of higher education. Their finances are based on prestige, which means turning students away, not enrolling more. How could they teach the masses without diminishing the value of their degree?

But MIT’s 2001 debut of OpenCourse-Ware epitomised a key insight: Elite universities can separate their credential from their teaching — and give at least parts of their teaching away as a public service. They are not diminishing their reputations at all. In fact, they are expanding their reach and reputation. It turns out there is extraordinary demand for bits and pieces of the education places like MIT provide, even without the diploma.

OpenCourseWare’s site gets more than 1 million hits per month, with translated versions getting 500,000 more. About 60% of users are outside the United States. About 15% are educators, and 30% students at other universities. About half have no university affiliation.

“I think the fundamental realisation is that distance learning will solve the problem of access to certification, but there’s a larger problem, which is access to information,” says Steve Carson, director of external relations for the MIT initiative.

“If you’re going to work as a public health professional, you need the certification,” Carson says. “If you’re working in a community” — say, in Africa _ “you don’t need the certification. You just need access to the information.”

About 11,600 kilometers from Cambridge, the Polytechnic of Namibia is the kind of place eager to learn from MIT. Though barely a decade old, the school in the young African nation’s capital Windhoek, is poised to play a key role in the country’s development. It is one of 84 sites in Africa where MIT has shipped its course materials on hard drives for institutions to store locally on their own networks. With bandwidth costing about 1,000 times its price in the United States, patching into OpenCourseWare over the internet would crash the school’s fragile networks.
CIO Laurent Evrard says the Polytechnic takes pride in standards on a par with top global peers — he notes how US exchange students get credit for work there — and says students like using Open-CourseWare to see how they stack up.

“Everybody here knows about MIT,” he says, though it does not hurt that the school rector — its top official — is an alumnus. On the opposite coast of southern Africa, Jiwaji says most of his Tanzanian students have never heard of MIT. Students use the courses “because it gives them a tool. They feel lost and they don’t have good books,” Jiwaji says. “They need a guide to help them.” His distance university — with 30,000 registered students — has OpenCourseWare available at centres around the capital of Dar es Salaam. There, it gets an impressive 600 hits per day, mostly in management classes.

Though it has found a wider audience, OpenCourseWare was originally intended for teachers. The idea was not just to show off MIT’s geniuses but to share its innovative teaching methods. After examining an MIT course called ‘Machine Structures’, Khan, the Pakistani professor, redesigned his lab assignments for a computer science class to get students more involved, asking them to design and build their own microprocessors.

“It really encourages the students to discover and try something new,” he said. “Normally the stress here is on how things work, not on creating things of your own.” MIT’s free offerings focus mostly on well-organised texts like syllabuses and readings, along with an expanding video lecture collection. Others, like Stanford and Bowdoin College in Maine, provide more polish, editing and features. Berkeley, meanwhile, is focused less on bells and whistles than on ramping up its ability to roll out content with a system that automatically records and posts lectures. Berkeley’s eight YouTube courses drew 1.5 million downloads in the first month, said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of the webcast.berkeley program, and the school is inundated with requests to post more.

“That’s why we’re so focused on automation,” he said. “Our motto is ‘Fiat Lux’ _ ‘let there be light.’ We feel like this is a great way to let the light of Berkeley shine out on the world.”
A big obstacle is cost. Professors are reluctant to participate unless staff are provided to help with logistics. A major expense is video camera operators, unless schools can persuade lecturers to stand still at the lectern. MIT estimates OpenCourseWear costs a hefty $20,000 per course. Money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation started the project, but from now on it will rely mostly on contributions from MIT’s budget and endowment, and from visitor donations. –– AP

GLOBAL WINDOW

MIT prof Gilbert Strang‘s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 m times since June alone

Sheraz Ali Khan in Peshawar uses Strang and other MIT profs as guides to design his own classes and direct students to MIT’s courses for help

Video game programmer Dustin Darcy in Los Angeles uses linear algebra regularly in his work and prefers this to going through his ‘dusty,old books’