by WILEY ROBINSON, Dayton Beacon
I don’t know how orange it is, but you know what’s a pretty big idea? Free online university-level courses over the web. The implications of this medium of education are astounding, and everyone should be extremely excited about it, despite the fact that the potential is largely marginalized by the very institutions who sponsored the idea. The very first example of open course ware is traced back to 1999 when the University of Tubingen in Germany released videos of lectures online; but the most influential point of origin would have to be when MIT spearheaded its OpenCourseWare initiative, which has released course materials for about 2,000 classes in most major fields and is purported to have benefited and supplemented the education of over 100 million people world-wide. Since then, several other colleges like Stanford and Berkeley have come to the fore with their own ideas about class structure and availability. For example, Stanford makes you pay for degrees and certificates online that cost up to $60,000, but pretty much everyone involved offers the ability to peruse course materials for free without certification or predetermined structure.
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