Online learning

This is potentially one of the most significant developments in education: "The world's top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they're arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information. And mostly, they are giving it away."
All because they've realised that they are a service industry not purveyors of knowledge as such. The money is in tuition, interaction and awarding degrees. Putting the courses online is not really very different to selling a textbook except that the 'textbook' is badged with the uni name rather than the lecturers.
For small colleges, like my own, the potential benefits: "Small schools like Bowdoin can use iTunes to show prospective students the richness of their offerings" there is also the possibility of using and recycling into our own teaching the online content generated in these projects -which is, recall, like using a textbook (remember the real 'product' being offered is personal tuition and award and possibly some degree of 'identity' as an alumn/a/us). It may also call for a review of the blanket dislike of online sources for citations. Imho, this needs to be seen on a par with books: you need to learn to use good judgement in assessing potential sources. And with the amount of good stuff now being made available on the internet (yes; along with the merely ephemeral and unthinking) it would be foolish to have an automatic bias against an online source simply for being online. In fact the advantage is that it is easy to check an online source.
At our college we have an array of speakers (eg Tom Wright) some of the content of their lectures would make an attractive 'draw' to our site and give us a chance to gain recongnition.
Wired News - AP News: