Monday 1 May 2006

The last remaining building block for free online courses

There is free hosting for media - Ourmedia.org provides you with free bandwidth to publish and store video, audio and other media that you created. But you will need a free Internet Archive account first.

Easier ways to share

  • photos (and graphic images) is flickr.com

  • videos is myTube.com


  • There are free blog hosting, such as blogger.com

    There are free content too.

    Open Course Ware from MIT which is a large-scale, Web-based publication of the educational materials from the MIT faculty’s courses. This unique initiative enables the open sharing of the MIT faculty’s teaching materials with educators, enrolled students, and self-learners around the world. MIT OCW provides users with open access to the syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, even a selection of video lectures, from 1,100 MIT courses representing 34 academic disciplines and all five of MIT’s schools..

    Wikibooks is a collection of free, open-content textbooks that you can edit. They have 14,305 book modules in over 1000 books when I visited their site today.

    Yahoo groups are free for everyone to create groups which support discussions.

    What I am trying to do here is to show that *almost* all the technological building blocks to deliver online learning program are available free NOW, including *content*. Most of these are designed for open and informal use.

    If teachers want to run courses online, the final piece of building block would be a student management system - yes, there are open source LMS e.g. moodle, but there is yet free hosted student management services.

    If there is any venture capitalist interested in putting this last piece in place, please contact me.

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