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Take Ivy League Classes for Free With Open Course Sharing

by Amar Toor on April 1, 2010 at 08:20 AM

An Ivy League education will cost you a handsome 50 grand a year, but -- thanks to a growing trend in online resource sharing -- you can now access the exact same course materials as Harvard students, without spending a dime. The trend began back in 2000, when MIT established the first OpenCourseWare (OCW) site, where average users could access class syllabi and lectures within a mouse's click. Since then, the OCW Consortium has been expanded to include over 200 schools and more than 13,000 available courses, according to the New York Times.

The obvious question, though, is why universities would choose to give away material when they could easily force people to pay steep tuition fees. The answer is both philosophical and economic: Education, as a common good, should be made freely available. In theory, schools wouldn't have to worry about their coffers drying up, either. As Johns Hopkins University dean James Yager says, "Students take courses because they want interaction with faculty, they want interaction with one another. Those things are not available on OCW."

With more schools facing budget crunches, though, some colleges are now considering new business models in order to make a profit off of their free material. There's also a marked divide between the philosophy of elite and non-elite schools. Ivy Leaguers, for example, remain concerned that open course sharing could diminish their prestige, while lesser-known schools see it as an opportunity to put their names on the same map as Harvard.

Perhaps the world of higher education may be in the middle of the same kind of transition that the music industry underwent a decade ago. In much the same way that established record labels felt threatened by the rise of the MP3, the older, more established universities now seem more hesitant to embrace course sharing for fear of shaking up the collegial hierarchy. The difference, though, is that there's still something invaluable about an actual degree from Harvard, and that's something that OCW can't yet offer. Until it does, OCW and the like won't be able to replace an Ivy League education, but they'll at least be able to spread insights from the best minds in the world. And that's about as universally philanthropic as the Internet could possibly get. [From: New York Times]

Tags: college, courses, education, internet, ivy league, IvyLeague, OCW, opencourseware, sharing, students, top, universities

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