Open courses have sprouted up over the past decade as a new realm in the online education industry. While you cannot get a degree based solely on open courses, these free courses have influenced many individuals to go back to school and have supplemented other courses. The best online universities in the realm of open courseware are not your typical for-profit school. Instead, the leading contenders in open courses are schools like MIT and Yale, which offer internet users the opportunity to peek in on a popular lecture, or go over lecture notes for a variety of different classes.
The growth of open courses has grown tremendously in the past few years, as new online schools have opened that offer solely open courses. The New York Times has noted, however, that this is a pricey process, with schools spending over $150 million in the past decade on open courses. While the purpose of many of these open courses was to appeal to fellow educators and help them structure their own courses better, this original intention has drastically changed. The largest percentage of internet users who browse open courses are typically doing so to expand their knowledge. There is additionally another large percentage of students who use open courses to supplement their current college classes, a factor many community colleges are striving to take advantage of.
The supplemental aspect of online courses has helped bolster the effects of leading online universities on education. Many studies have indicated that students have the tendency to retain more information from classes if they are additionally supplemented by open courses. Open courses now allow students to track their progress as they continue on the syllabus. While they cannot receive course credit for most open courses, this helps students succeed in their traditional classes while cutting down the time it takes to learn a lesson. Yale remains one of the best universities for open courses, although this comes with a disclaimer: the courses are strictly for those who want to learn, rather than those who want to earn credit.
Open courses and online education are just the latest trends in the fast-expanding world of the internet and social media. We have expanded from the early days of Yahoo! to the more modern days of Wikipedia, Facebook, and Craigslist. It is no wonder that open courses evolved as they have over the years, even spawning online colleges that offer exclusive open courses to all of their students (although still not offering firm degree programs). It is only a matter of time before the online education industry changes once more, producing a higher-caliber range of online universities and open courses.
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