More Universities Publishing Courses Online

This Washington Post article reports on how more universities are releasing their courses online following the lead of MIT with its giant OpenCourseWare. Some of the universities mentioned in the article with similar open course wares (although much smaller) include Yale and John Hopkins. It's now becoming more than just class notes. Berkeley has published many of its course lectures on You Tube.

I was going to try to list all of the open course wares available from universities, but I found a website that already has made this list at iBerry.com.

You can't get a degree from these online resources, but these can assist you while you're working on your degree. For those not seeking a degree, these resources can be used just for the sake of learning.

Unfortunately, these internet resources don't seem to be helping in bringing down the cost of education. I can see there will always be value to be physically present at a lecture on in a lab. However, online resources should be able to reduce this without sacrificing education quality. Fewer classrooms, buildings, parking lots, etc. should reduce cost. But as this article describes, higher education costs are increasing more than inflation and students are facing higher debts.

Nationally, over the past decade, the average student debt has risen from $9,250 to $19,200—a 58 percent increase factoring inflation.

There is still a lot of work to be done to really improvement online education to make education better, more accessible, and cheaper.