Universities Worldwide Offer Free Open Courseware

Boston, MA (AHN) - More than 100 universities worldwide - including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame - have joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in a consortium of schools promoting open courseware.

Virtually all MIT courses are now available online for free and its OpenCourseWare site gets more than 1 million hits per month, with translated versions getting 500,000 more.

The major difference between online and real courses: one cannot get credit or earn a degree on free courseware.

MIT estimates OpenCourseWear costs $20,000 per course. Money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation started the project and currently relies on contributions from MIT's budget and endowment and from visitor donations.

Yale announced this month it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.

"iTunes U", a section of Apple's popular music and video downloading service, now publicly hosts free material from 28 colleges.

The University of California, Berkeley recently announced it would be the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube.

About 3.5 million American students (20 percent students at degree-granting institutions) are now signed up for at least one online course, according to the Sloan Consortium online learning group.