How Coursera, A Free Online Education Service, Will School Us All. Illustration by Yuko Shimizu Christos Porios, 16, lives in Alexandroupolis, a small Greek city on the Aegean Sea about 20 miles from Greece's eastern border with Turkey. "My mother's a teacher and my father's a mechanic," he explains, adding that neither is particularly knowledgeable about computers--especially compared with him. For years, he's had free rein over the family PC, and he's taken advantage of the time to teach himself programming. Mainly, he uses sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and the Khan Academy--a portal with thousands of short, free educational videos.
"Yes," says Porios. "I would call myself a geek. " "At first they were like, 'You can't learn anything that way.' Last fall, as the Greek economy spiraled toward default and rioters filled the streets of Athens, Porios was glued to his computer, but not to follow the eurozone crisis. If one teenager in one small city in Greece can become a genius hacker through an online course, does it mean the world has changed? Tech Ed. Stanford Online | Stanford University.
New Global University To Be Both Free and For-Profit. Online Education | News New Global University To Be Both Free and For-Profit By Dian Schaffhauser08/22/12 A former digital media czar and small town mayor are working together to launch a new fully online university that will be free for students. The two founders, CEO Curtis Pickering and President Scott Hines, said they expect to open World Education University at the end of October or beginning of November 2012. Pickering said in a statement that both he and Hines were from "economically disadvantaged backgrounds and products of free college education," and they "believe that everyone should have this same opportunity. " "For us it's a personal journey," Hines explained. WEU (pronounced "we-you") aims to become a comprehensive, degree-granting institution.
The Education ModelTo address the large number of students the university expects to attract, it will rely on multiple forms of technology, Hines said. Learning. Coursera.org. Free courses from world's top unis a swipe away in online revolution. IMAGINE a university degree that is like a passport: a subject from Swinburne stamped alongside another from Sydney University, with courses from overseas colleges such as Stanford or Harvard thrown in. You could earn your degree without travelling further than your laptop, and far more cheaply than on campus. Far-fetched? The proliferation of websites offering courses from top universities - MIT and Stanford among them - and the globalisation of learning generally means this scenario may one day be possible.
Higher education is in the middle of a digital revolution, and who has access to it, and how it is done, will shift dramatically in the next few years. ''The world of tertiary education is changing fundamentally, and the pace of change is greater than ever before,'' says Monash University vice-chancellor Ed Byrne, likening it to the 15th-century invention of the printing press. Advertisement When he finished the course, Dr Chai received a certificate of completion for no charge.