Free education online: yes!

I think it will be inevitable: we will go toward a world in which more and more education will be for free. For thousands and thousands of students. Much is already freely available, think of the enormous success of open source sites such as Wikipedia. And when I saw the TED presentation about online learning yesterday, tipped by EAIE the European Association for International Education, I was even more convinced: this is the New Learning.

Daphne Koller, the lecturer at this TED presentation, is a professor at the prestigious university of Stanford and founder of a relatively new initiative Coursera. It is a web site where three top universities, Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley, offer their 112 courses for free. And in the end, after having finished your course successfully, you get a valid certificate which may make a real difference in applying for a job.

All you need is a computer, Internet access, time and dedication. And you need to understand English. That’s all for such valuable stuff. I’m going to subscribe to one course and as soon as it starts I will let you know on this blog what my experiences are. So stay tuned!