Free Republic

If you havenÂ’t heard, universities around the world offering their courses online for free (or at least partially free). These courses are collectively called MOOCS or Massive Open Online Courses. In the past seven years or so, over 800 universities have created around 10,000 of these MOOCs. And IÂ’ve been keeping track of these MOOCs the entire time over at Class Central, ever since they rose to prominence. In the past four months alone, 190 universities have announced 600 such free online courses. IÂ’ve compiled this list below and categorized the courses into the following subjects: Computer Science, Mathematics, Programming,...

Berkeley previously housed an online library consisting of more than 20,000 videos of lectures. These videos were free and accessible to the public. But they are free no longer: next week, administrators will withdraw access to anyone who isn't a Berkeley student or professor. Two employees of Gallaudet University—a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C.—filed a complaint with DOJ alleging that Berkeley's online content was inaccessible to the hearing-disabled community. After looking into the matter, DOJ determined that Berkeley had indeed violated the Americans with Disabilities Act Berkeley had two choices: spend a fortune adding closed captioning to the...

Universities and colleges are slow to adjust to the new student: one who isn’t full-time and living on-campus, but the adult, working college student. At an event held by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, a college president, a director of community college policy analysis and a for-profit institution’s academic strategy president discussed the implications of the changing higher education landscape. John Ebersole, president of Excelsior College in New York, said, “It’s time for us, the public policy community, to understand the students.” It is “not typical today” for students to be full-time, enrolled students on brick-and-mortar college campuses. His...

The School Reform News, published by the Heartland Institute, found there are over 1,200 massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered by over 200 universities and taken by an estimated ten million K-12 students. homeschooling Florida is the nation’s leader in offering MOOCs, where students watch video lectures recorded online and participate in online discussion boards, which could reduce the cost of higher education for students and state taxpayers. Michael Horn, cofounder of the Clayton Christianson Institute, said, “People would be foolish to overlook it.” Florida state legislators are considering moving the state to MOOCs at the K-12 level, but...