Guest Author - Sanita Salter

Each year for the past 20 years US News & World Report has published a rating, ranking, review of colleges to include those in the US as well as world wide. I received my annual email that the new directory was now available and took a browse to search for my alma mater the University of Washington, Seattle campus, and my current school where I have almost completed my master’s degree online Walden University. What I found at the US News directory was a link to e-learning programs which had been evaluated and ranked some have information available and others did not all listed were accredited institutions. Information is available for both online and campus based institutions.

From the directory there were several interesting topics listed one of which was titled The Open Coursework Consortium. This is a collaboration among over 200 institutions worldwide to share the content of entire courses (over 1,800) complete with lecture notes, lectures, and in fact the lecture was video taped and is available all for free! Of course, the desire to know the difference in coursework at Johns Hopkins University, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), University of California, Berkley, Michigan State, University of Massachusetts, Tufts University, and several other US institutions and my current and previous coursework at Walden U and U of WA.

MIT also offers in their open courseware some help to high school students in getting a heads up on AP courses to prepare for college level work. Among the courses listed are complete class lectures, notes, and resources in psychology statistics, validity, and reliability at Johns Hopkins, and Michigan State had an International Business course available.

One lecturer of physics has several of his lectures on physics 1, 2, and 3 available online for viewing. You can pretty much take the classes, learn the material, and take the tests, etcetera all online. There is no credit available and contact with the instructors is not an option, which is reasonable since the lecture information is free.

The purpose of the open courseware project seems a bit ostentatious and its usefulness could be questioned except in the case of someone looking to expand their knowledge base on the multitude of free topics available. I was never good in chemistry, biology, and calculus but would love to take a crack at it penalty free. Therefore, my goal for 2009 is to learn as much as I can and pass along the information and well if I can learn it free then that is always a good thing.