DESIGNstudioFEUP

Learning for free

A recent article in the Hamburg magazine for education and training, “weiter”, addressed the wide range of possibilities of free education via the internet. This is a topic that is very relevant to the EDTI project and the prospects of future e-learning. Through the availability of broad bandwidth and private access, there are already many offers for training and tutorials on the internet, including both video and audio, that are available free of charge. Especially as many universities have taken up the trend to make learning material and excerpts from their courses accessible to the public. Examples include the “Open-Access”-Initiative, which has its roots in several universities, the British “Open University” and the highly regarded “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” (MIT), that offers material from over 1.800 courses and seminars. The large volume and variety of materia l available via the internet represents a problem in itself because it is not properly indexed and the quality of the material is variable, for these reasons it is difficult to utilise these resources because of the time it takes to research it properly. The EDTI project, in the future, may be able to address these issues regarding the lack of formal degrees and certificates and accessing the volume and variety of material.

Links to examples mentioned above and others can be found here:
Open Access: www.open-access-net (German and English)
Open University: www.open.ac.uk (English); www.open.ac.uk/germany/german/home.php (German)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/about/ (English)
BBC Learning English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/ (English)
E-Learning directory: www.e-learning-suche.de (German)