Harvard Law offering first free online course

The new phenomenon seen nowadays in higher education around the world is the online open courses, also known as MOOCs. So, what is MOOC?A MOOC is an open online course that can be pursued by the masses through Internet. In a MOOC, the course materials are uploaded by a University, college or institute through portals like edX, etc.These portals allow students from across the world to enrol into a course of their choice free of cost and access the course material of institutes like Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, University of British Columbia, and University of Melbourne, University of Toronto.

The good part is that while doing a particular course, students may be given assignments and exams to complete and at the end of the course certificates of course completion are also granted.So all those students who want to upgrade their skills into specific fields, this is probably what you can check out. Also, the courses available on MOOCs are plenty. Be it medicine, law, computer science, business and management, Business Administrationn and social sciences, everything is available and that too for free.It is estimated that close to 400 courses are available through MOOCs, and the lists are growing. Each course takes around 600 hours to convert to be online ready, and cost the university approx $45,000.

As per The Horizon Report of 2012, Higher Education Edition predicts how emerging technologies in education will have an impact in the next five years globally. People will increasingly expect to work, learn and study, at anytime and anywhere. MOOCs will allow this.In Kenya, there is rising access to the Internet owing to broadband technologies. The Internet is also becoming more affordable. The University of Melbourne in Australia signed up to Coursera in Septemb,er and in just over two months, it had more than 52,000 enrolment.Now the question arises, why are universities interested in sharing their courses with the world for free?Having their course material available to all, universities get to interact with students of caliber, who otherwise do not participate in such classes. Such an experience also opens up new theories, arguments and reasoning.Also, students are unable to make it into top institutions get to feel how things are taught in such institutes.

online courses are changing study

When the first movable-type printing press began churning out books in 1439, knowledge that belonged to an elite few flowed to masses of hungry learners.This year, something similar happened. Select courses taught at places like Stanford on subjects like physics were offered for free online, meaning that a level of education once available only to Ivy League-level college students is now an option in places like Pakistan, Ghana and Tibet.These courses, called Massive Open Online Courses make education cheaper and more accessible, but some say they have potential to undermine the current profit model.

"This transition to digital learning is as significant as when we first began to learn from books, said Karen Cator, director of the U.S. Office of Educational Technology. "Now we have a whole new opportunity to learn, with expert explanations, simulations and models of complex ideas. It's interesting and exciting, and it also needs continued research.Online classes have been around for decades, providing a convenient, if rather dull, learning environment for correspondence courses and basic education. MOOCs have much more going for them: the ability to turn a Harvard professor's best course into a global learning community via the Internet, usually at no cost to the learner.To get an idea of what a typical MOOC is like, the nine-week Introduction of Astronomy course available through the Coursera website at coursera.org is a good place to start. The class is taught by Duke University physics professor Ronen Plesser, whose video course introduction paints a glowing picture of a splendorous universe. Tests and assignments are graded automatically, and the course workload takes six to eight hours per week. No college credit is given, but students can pay to get a certificate proving they completed the course.

In the past year, interest in MOOCs like this one have exploded. Upstart companies that provide the classes have seen dramatic growth. Coursera, one of them, has 2 million subscribers and partners with schools like Stanford, Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities to provide content.MOOCs have been around for at least five years. One of the first people to create one was Utah State University professor David Wiley, who found a way to invite people all over the world to interact within a 2007 class he was teaching on the USU campus, via the Internet.In Canada, educational technologists David Cormier and Bryan Alexander hit upon a similar idea at around the same time, and christened their online learning community a "MOOC"  Massive Open Online Course in 2008. A buzzword was born, albeit one that sounds like a coughing cow when pronounced.

Wiley's first open online class adapted the community-driven idea behind open source software and applied it to educational content, creating a learning environment where everything happened online.You put so much work into building a course and getting it ready to offer, and you have this feeling that there are a lot of people in the world whose lives would be blessed if they had a chance to learn some of the things you are teaching," Wiley said. "It turns out to be very little extra effort to put it all online, and do it in such a way that anyone can participate.Endless replication of a good teacher's work creates tantalizing possibilities, said Cator: "Every teacher doesn't have to do the whole thing over themselves. We will have the best-of-the-best playlist of lectures and interactions, and we'll begin to understand which are most helpful for different kinds of students."

Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad

Shawnee State University student Melissa Collins, the daughter of Sherman and Sherri Collins, of Franklin Furnace, has received a $4,500 Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study in Morocco.The scholarship is a Congressionally-funded program sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and is administered by the Institute of International Education through its office in Houston, Texas.

Collins will attend Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.Studying abroad is going to be a life changing experience for me, and I am very excited,” Collins said. “I hope to get to know a lot of the local students and other internationals at Al Akhawayn.The program provides scholarships to students who study abroad, including students from diverse backgrounds and students going to non-traditional study abroad destinations. The scholarship will pay for fees, tuition, room and board, airfare, books, local transportation and insurance.The Gilman Program is the largest undergraduate study abroad scholarship in the nation, now awarding over 2,300 scholarships annually. In 10 years, the Gilman Program has received more than 31,000 applications and has awarded more than 8,800 scholarships to students studying in 125 countries and enrolled in nearly 950 U.S. institutions.Collins is the second student at Shawnee State University to receive the scholarship in the past few years. Jonathan Phillips, of New Boston, received the scholarship in spring 2010.

First free online course offerd by MSU

Learning how to turn complex technical terms into plain English is the subject of a new online course at Michigan State University.
The Foundations of Science class makes the tongue-in-cheek promise that students will learn "to speak mumbo jumbo" and amaze their friends.
The East Lansing school says the class is its first free Massive Open Online Course and debuts in May 2013.
Stephen Thomas (Zoologist) says he and course co-creator Julie Libarkin seek to help students improve their critical thinking skills and make better decisions.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is providing $50,000 to fund the course, which will be offered worldwide. Michigan State says Thomas and Libarkin hope the class attracts at least 10,000 students.

Open Free online courses

In the fall of 2011, a free online course was offered by Stanford University on the subject of artificial intelligence. The instructors were world-renowned experts in their field and this massive open online course, or MOOC, wound up with an unprecedented enrollment of 160,000 students and ushered in a new era of virtual education.But what if artificial intelligence isn’t your thing? The good news is free resources are rapidly coming online for business owners and entrepreneurs, covering topics ranging from leadership to innovation to startups. Here’s a look at some of them:

Take the challenge: One recently launched offering is the 21 Day Leadership Challenge.The challenge features management consultant and New York Times bestselling business author of Tribal Leadership Dave Logan in a series of 3-minute videos delivered via email. Each video contains both information and a homework assignment, most of which take about 20 minutes to complete, with a few one hour assignments mixed in. The three-week program promises greater confidence, along with a better ability to light a fire of enthusiasm under tribe.

Leading innovation: Coursera is another major player in this space, with 33 university partners, including Cal Tech, Columbia, Duke, Princeton, Stanford and UC San Francisco. Coursera offers the class Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses,” which starts in January 2013, or Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations,” which starts in February 2013. The classes are offered by the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University respectively, and require a four to eight-hour workload per week.The long and the short of startups: If you’re looking for a quicker hit of learning and inspiration, consider the free videos available at StartupSchool.org from Y Combinator’s annual program. This year’s lineup included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, and famed angel investor Ron Conway. Each video is about 30 minutes.

And if those talks put you in the mood to join the startup scene., consider visiting www.Udacity.com to register for “How to Build a Startup. The course is presented on demand by Steve Blank, the co-author, along with Bob Dorf, of “The Startup Owner’s Manual.” Blank’s book and “Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur are the suggested, but not required, texts. Enrollment is fast and allows you to participate in discussion forums, view the 8 lectures, and track your completion percentage via a progress meter.Whether you are looking at a slow end-of-year season or contemplating your new year’s resolutions, it might behoove you as a leader and entrepreneur to jump onboard the MOOC bandwagon.

Free information technology courses

Two Bay area schools are teaming up with the Tampa Bay Workforce Alliance to offer free information technology courses.Drawing from a U.S . Department of Labor grant, the classes are offered at Hilsborough Community College and St. Petersburg College. Administrators say the training is a response to an increased demand for information technology hires.

We're looking at skills gaps. What does industry need? And how can we feed them the workforce that they require in order to get their business done in Tampa Bay? said Rachel Gelbmann, a program director with the Tampa Bay Workforce Alliance.Entrance into the classes is competitive. To be accepted, applicants must meet certain eligibility requirements, in addition to passing either a computer literacy test or college placement test.