Volunteer Teachers

A new university is scheduled to begin offering courses in February. While an announcement of this type may not seem terribly newsworthy on the surface, one thing sets this university apart from many others: the faculty members will be volunteers. Founders of P2P (peer-to-peer) University, including Joel Thierstein (executive director of Connexions at Rice University), believe that the time is right for the initiative, and point to current successful models such as Wikipedia and the MIT OpenCourseWare project. Working professionals and retirees are the target market for the P2P University courses. These individuals will not received credit for the courses they take through this institution; rather the hope is that credit will be obtain via other institutions such as Western Governors University.

The big question is: Who are these volunteers who will teach the courses? At present, the founders have 10 professors who are prominent in their respective fields (no names are being released yet). Those at P2P hope to continue along this trajectory and attract more celebrity professors to the program. Even with star profs participating in this "design research experiment," a major concern is student retention.

Opening Up Education

MIT's M. S. Vijay Kumar, the editor of Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, was yesterday's guest on EDUCAUSE Live! For those like me who were not able to connect to this free talk, the event was archived. Multimedia, HTML (session details and the book), and PowerPoint slides from the session are available.

Free Courses at Yale

Yale just announced that the institution is adding eight new, free courses to its roster. The courses are available here, and they cover topics such as game theory, biomedical engineering, financial markets, and Greek history, just to name a few. The only licensing restrictions on these courses is that they are not to be used for commercial purposes. This means that instructors can download, redistribute, and remix the content. Yale hopes to add more courses in the future.