Manufacturing Intelligence

by Matt Stambaugh

It’s here!  The Utopian ideal of free education for all is closer than ever thanks to the Interweb.  While the ‘open classroom’ concept has been evolving for several years, many prestigious universities and colleges are now offering high quality audio and even video recordings online of their classes.  I’ve been taking an online physics course (I know, N-E-R-D…) from MIT for the past several weeks and the quality is exceptional.  Some great places examples include;

• MIT Opencourseware
• UC Berkley Online
• iTunesU (Includes courses from Stanford, Oxford, and many more.  To access open iTunes, goto the iTunes Store, and then select iTunesU)

This is a spectacular idea.  Education is a powerful tool and I cannot applaud the participating institutions enough for providing this content.  I highly doubt that by posting topical and freshmen courses online they will lower their enrollments, while providing information and content that other schools and students from around the world can use to enrich the quality of their courses and educations.  What’s interesting is no Canadian post-secondary institutions currently offer this service (at least not that I could find), and only two of them – Athabasca and Capilano College – are part of the OpenCourseware Consortium.

Since most schools in Canada are largely funded with public dollars, there is a strong case to be made that schools should provide these courses online for public consumption.  This would allow Canadians to appreciate the high quality of our post-secondary system and perhaps help to increase our willingness to fund our universities and colleges so that we may continue to compete globally in the ‘knowledge economy’.  Or, if our schools stink, maybe forcing them to post some of their classes online will light the fire they need to increase the quality of their education.  In any case seems like a low cost/high return program.  Let’s get on it…

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Matt Stambaugh is an Information Security Consultant who dabbles in media, primarily as a weekly national technology columnist with CBC Radio. This post is cross-posted to www.mattstambaugh.com.