Free Online Education
Universities and Colleges in the united are offering free online courses which includes videotaped materials. In lieu of this, YouTube created a hub dedicated to video courses, YouTube EDU.
Most of the most viewed videos in YouTube EDU are of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Physics Professor Walter Lewin. Other universities that posts clips includes University of California in Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.
Although the courses offered on YouTube EDU are free and not for credit, they surely are very educational and can aid students in their way to finishing their degree.
Online education is becoming in demand as a result of global economic recession. Taking courses online doesn’t require the student to spend money going to school or pay rents for dormitories or apartments. Research shows that the number of universities offering online education is booming.
Another organization, Nature Education, launched scitable.com, a website they described as “collaborative online learning space for science.”
What we wanted to do with Scitable is to bring education roundly into the 21st century, to take advantage of all of the tools and technology available today,” said Vikram Savkar, publishing director of Nature Education, a division of Britain’s Nature Publishing Group.
“One of our goals is to level the playing field when it comes to science,” he told AFP. “Most countries in the world see developing a trained workforce and research cadre in science as key to their national development.
“Science impacts nearly everything — medicine, agriculture, industry — but access to top quality science information and education is unequally distributed around the world,” Savkar said.
“In many cases it’s expensive. In many cases it’s just inaccessible,” he said. “One of our major goals with Scitable is to offer very high-quality content and community experts that students anywhere in the world can turn to.”
I believe online education is the key to growth and success of the young generation. Here in the Philippines not all students who finished High School go to College because of poverty. I think offering them this kind of education will help them fulfill their dreams and become successful. It’s not expensive compared to enrolling in a university and going to school everyday. The government just needs to allocate funds to allow the government-owned universities to offer free online education to the poor children who has great potential. Why spend billions of pesos in non-sense politically-inclined projects when you can use that money for the benefit of the unfortunate citizens and eventually they will also help in the progress of the country?
