In my post http://www.inside-higher-ed.com/how-does-your-course-compare/, there is a link to MIT’s OpenCouresWare. These are MIT courses that the university has put online for their students – or for anyone who wants to use the materials. Furthermore, if you go to https://www.edx.org/university_profile/MITx you will find a site that explains how MIT and Harvard are jointly offering to not just put courses online, but to allow anyone to take their course for certification! There are other places where this is happening. For example, Carnegie Mellon has an “Open Learning Initiative” at http://oli.cmu.edu/.
All of this is very big and will change learning. It will no longer be sufficient to say, “I went to X university, It’s a great school. I must have learned.” Employers won’t take a chance on that, when they can look for themselves online to see who learned and who didn’t. It is very easy to look at exams online and figure out who really knows their stuff.
A good article about what is happening is by Tom Friedman of the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/friedman-revolution-hits-the-universities.html
You can read more about online courses here,
http://chronicle.com/article/MIT-Mints-a-Valuable-New-Form/130410/
Tamar Lewin’s page at the New York Times contains links to her several good articles, http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/l/tamar_lewin/index.html
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