OpenCourseWare: College education, without the student loans

George Turney/The Orange County Register/NEWSCOM

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From the frigid region of the Arctic Circle to the battlefields of Iraq, a free, virtual classroom is taking hold.

Spurred by advances in technology and people’s hunger to get an extra edge in a down economy, universities and colleges are posting course materials – including syllabi, class notes, and lectures – online for anyone to access. This movement, known as OpenCourseWare, allows self learners to save money on tuition, gives alumni a link to their alma mater, and enables prospective students to peek into university classrooms.

Already more than 200 colleges and universities offer courses ranging from art history to economics for free on demand. The classes can be watched on YouTube or downloaded to iPods. And the consortium continues to grow.

When he served in Iraq, John Shelton, a member of the Navy Counter-IED (improvised explosive device) roadside task force, patrolled while listening to psychology and history lectures from the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y.

And on research trips to the northernmost Canadian military base – known as Alert – near the Arctic Circle, physicist Wendy Ermold of the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington in Seattle watches Stanford University quantum physics lectures on her iPod.

Unlike places such as the University of Phoenix, which charge – and give degrees – for distance learning courses, OpenCourseWare is free and offers no reward other than knowledge.

The OpenCourseWare concept began in 2003. That year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided it couldn’t turn a profit from putting online its hands-on curriculum with an emphasis on laboratory work online. Instead, MIT began providing its syllabi, course notes, and eventually, video and audio lectures online for free. MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative started by listing 500 courses in 2003. Even that first year the program attracted more than 4 million visits to its web pages.

But today, in less than a decade, the institution has archived 1,897 courses – and in April 2009 alone attracted more than 1 million visits.

Soon, MIT had lots of company. The college’s foray into uncharted education territory spurred a worldwide movement for other colleges to provide OpenCourseWare materials through their institution’s websites and the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which boasts more than 100 million visits since its launch in 2006.

The movement has grown to include its own YouTube channel, YouTube EDU, which hosts videos from more than 100 colleges and universities, as well as Academic Earth, which lists video lectures from six Ivy League institutions. (Academic Earth is run by Richard Ludlow, a Yale graduate who used MIT OpenCourseWare linear algebra materials to improve his grades in college.)

Apple, too, has jumped on the bandwagon with iTunes U, allowing curious minds to download video and audio lectures to their iPods for learning on the go.

“People pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of learning…. I get it for free,” Mr. Shelton writes in an e-mail from his naval base in Pensacola, Fla. “And I would probably never get to experience it any other way.”

Life learners

Another regular user is Nick Warren, a lead web developer at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, in Little Rock, Ark. He listens in on MIT lectures whenever he chooses. After work, he often picks a course and listens to professors discuss electrical engineering and biology, following along with books listed on the class syllabi. Though they’re not for credit, Mr. Warren does list them on his resume, showing, he says, that he’s serious about continuing to develop his electrical engineering skills.

“I wanted future employers to know that I’m really seeking the best possible education,” he says in a phone interview. “I’m always trying to better my skill set.”

He’s not alone.

At the air station, naval crewman Shelton learned the basics of microeconomics by listening to OpenCourseWare lectures on the topic and passed a college level examination program (CLEP) for credit. He says he listens to lectures whenever he can: working, cleaning, even doing yard work. Recently, he listened to lectures on impressionism and modern art before he visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In Delhi, India, Deepak Kumar Gupta, a medical intern at the Lok Nayak Hospital, aspires to earn his PhD in biomedical engineering. Through OpenCourseWare, Dr. Gupta taught himself about new software and learned how to write computer programs by watching video lectures.

And right before bedtime or when she commutes to work, physicist Ms. Ermold, tunes her iPod into some OpenCourseWare lectures on physics, which she says helped her finally “understand some things I’d been confused about since taking quantum physics in high school.”