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Quote: "Like almost every organisation in the US, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent the late 1990s struggling with the question of how to take advantage of the internet. Many other colleges launched online degree courses aimed at anyone with a modem and a big wallet.
But MIT has taken a completely different direction with a project called OpenCourseWare (OCW) that could stop the trend of commercialising online education dead in its tracks. The first group of courses are set to be published on the internet on 30 September, including subjects like anthropology, biology, chemistry and computer science.
Comment:The hype of this will continue to build over the next week...but the implications will last much longer. Basically MIT is going against some recent trends of charging for content on the Internet. Instead they are using the Internet for "what it's good for" - connection people and information. Major education content providers should be concerned about this...why would a school pay for content (unless, of course, they have to buy content from certain providers in order to work in their proprietary course management systems...but that's another story...). The value of content is happening in all Internet circles - how are newspapers/magazines going to make money? Educators? Google, for example, just started a news aggregation service: Google News...run by algorithms...not people. It's a changing world...and what comes down the "pipe" has less value than the pipe itself...