, 1 min read
Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon
The people at Carnegie Mellon seem to have the right idea: their Open Learning Initiative offers you to browse right there and now the content of their courses. It seems to be a driving point: they want to make courses free for individuals, and low cost for institutions. By building communities around their courses, I guess they hope to make these same courses, the de facto standards. It could be very powerful and could make some other online schools obselete.
A primary objective of the project is to build a community of use for the courses that will play an important role in ongoing course development and improvement. The courses are developed in a modular fashion to allow faculty at a variety of institutions to either deliver the courses as designed or to modify the content and sequence to fit the needs of their students and/or their curricular and course goals. These courses will be broadly disseminated at no cost to individual students and at low cost to institutions.