Countries Offer Different Takes to Open Online Learning - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Description

Across the globe, governments and other organizations want to offer distance education to citizens, using online systems of free or low-cost courses. In countries like China and India, governments or public universities are backing such efforts. In the Netherlands and other nations, online-education leaders are searching for sustainable business models.

Many have relied on the library of free courses developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project as a springboard, but the trajectory of international projects has taken different directions.

Britain is leading the way in many aspects, thanks to the work of Open University. Committed to distance education since 1971—Open University created its own form of free education by broadcasting lectures on the BBC—the institution developed its open-courseware project in October 2006. Since then, its OpenLearn project reports more than eight million visits as of September 2009. The site allows anyone with Internet access the chance to take a number of courses on an independent basis.

OpenLearn, which is supported primarily by $8.9-million in grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has taken 5 percent (or 5,400 hours) of the university's multimedia online-teaching materials and made them free to the public.

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