MIT has initiated a new concept, named as “OpenCourseWare” which makes school’s courses available online for free! Now school students could find lecture notes, sample test papers, and possibly even video lectures by eminent professors across the world who are willing to contribute on the Internet. Gilbert Strang’s Math 18.06 course has emerged to be amongst the most sought out courses, and has had as many as 1.3 million downloads since June alone.

This has turned out to be a really great initiative with more and more people everyday downloading and going through the various courses available. Most of the students downloading the lectures are in fact themselves school teachers! Many students from eminent institutes as well use these lectures to often brush up their own concepts.

This new concept although introduced by MIT, has not been limited to just the MIT! Several of the world’s top universities have joined in on this initiative and slowly but steadily catching up.

The initiative started by MIT is one of the biggest contributions towards this new concept, and the trend is catching up like a fire in the forest. Over 100 universities across the world have joined in for the cause. Universities like Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Notre Dame, etc have shown interest in this new concept. Hence from now on you wouldn’t need a registered user id for a university like Princeton to hear or watch some of the prominent guests’ speeches. Yale university has also announced they will be making materials from seven popular courses online along with 30 more soon to follow.

Whelan, a Massachusetts retiree said, “It’s almost as good as being there”. The only thing that’s missing amongst this is the pressure on the students for finishing assignments. Also such new technology trends also do not allow students questions to be answered easily. And also you can’t earn a degree.

The Internet has certainly helped boom the education industry, higher education was never as easy. It is a multi-billion dollar industry for both profit making and non-profit making organizations. Several organizations have started with offering online courses and training for various degrees or for further education.

OpenCourseWare’s site has been getting more than 1 million hits per month, and the translated versions getting about 500,000 hits as well. It has been noticed that about 60 percent of visitors are from outside of the United States and about 15 percent of the visitors are educators, while 30 percent are students from several universities.

MIT had initiated this concept initially only for teachers, although it has found a much wider audience. MIT wasn’t trying to show off, but simply offered to share the concept of enabling other teachers across the world to be adept with better and more effective teaching methods.

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Thanks to the new approach adopted by the Walden University, they will now be convening via
wireless speakers and learning how to translate english to spanish is going to be much more interesting, interactive and easier. Even Kaplan University is following these lines for its online degree and even offering its french english dictionary online for collaboration.
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