Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

Examples

I) MIT’s Open Course Ware (OCW), established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, currently offers over 1,800 online courses that are enriched with multimedia content and teach thirty-five subject areas within the arts, sciences, and humanities. Being created exclusively by MIT, OCW is backed by MIT’s commitment for permanent updates but is not open to user contributions. It is essentially an electronic and multimedia-enriched version of almost all of MIT’s academic curriculum, including lecture notes, video lectures, exams, etc., offered for free, offering no certification or credit, requiring no registration, and, as indicated on the site, providing access to “materials that may not reflect the entire content of a [given] course.”

II) In a slightly different approach, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative currently offers an eclectic list of only about a dozen courses, which, however, are fully and exclusively developed for online students and are supported by ongoing educational research addressing course design and outcomes. Faculty from all over the world can create a free account and use the repository’s tools to create online courses that can be offered for free or at a nominal fee if credit is required. An educational initiative of a much larger scope than MIT’s OCW, the Open Learning Initiative organizes symposia, maintains pedagogical and education-technology blogs, and offers workshops on using and customizing existing-courses and on developing new, effective online courses.

III) Connexions is a collaborative, free, scholarly content archive that seems to share useful features from both resources discussed above, so I will be spending some more time on it.

The Connexions project started at Rice University in 1999, with the first non-Rice Connexions course contributed by the University of Illinois in 2002. Similarly to MIT’s OCW, Connexions has grown extensively and currently holds over 4,500 course modules, covering most typical disciplines and topics addressed in higher education. Similarly to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, new content is welcome and can easily be created by faculty from around the world, following a simple registration process.

The resource offers full courses (called ‘collections’), individual course modules, or stand-alone learning activities. Materials and learning activities are very well aligned, while remaining modular for flexibility in course customization. Based on my use of the resource, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness instructors are best off mixing and matching modules and activities from multiple collections and possibly supplementing them with additional (especially multimedia) materials. Connexions holdings are often linked to relevant course Web sites within the authors’ academic institutions, providing additional resources and context for understanding the materials.

The numerous items related to music (my area of expertise) are listed under “Arts,” with thirteen of the seventeen “collections” and approximately a third of the over four-hundred modules within Arts addressing music or sound-related topics. Items related to acoustics can also be found under “Science and Technology,” and, following a recent partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), Connexions will also be developing a set of signal-processing educational modules and courses.

In its vast majority, the content is accurate, well presented, supported by references to relevant literature, and occasionally enhanced through multimedia resources. Depending on subject area, special plug-ins may be required, all of which are downloadable from within the relevant learning object’s page. Usability features may change slightly with each course and contributor, but all courses/modules checked are clearly organized and very easy to use. The repository itself is also well organized and visually appealing, and it has clear instructions for use when necessary. Although not formally peer-reviewed, the collections are monitored by an editorial team and an oversight board, helping maintain high content standards.

The quality and learning impact of the resource was recently recognized by Harvard University’s Berkman Award (Berkman Center for Internet & Society), presented to Connexions founder and Rice University professor R. Baraniuk for his role in creating the repository. The learning impact and sustainability of this and other open educational resource repositories was addressed in a recent article from the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects.

We are all usually wary of anything offered for free, and for good reason. When it comes to free education, however, there are serious reasons (e.g. motivation of those offering it) and evidence (see above) that support rehashing the cliché: “the best things in life are free!” I have personally found the free resources discussed very useful and plan to become a contributor in the near future.