Going to Harvard from your own bedroom

By Merlin John ­

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Imperial College in London is making its lectures available online

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"In the online world you don't need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don't need to be trapped into a lecture timetable," says Peter Scott, director of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute.

The Open University, the UK's open access university, which allows people to study from home in their own time, has been an international pioneer of degree courses online.
The university, with more than 263,000 students in 23 countries, has become a record breaker on the iTunes U service, which provides a digital library of materials for university students and staff.
Instead of music or movies, Apple's iTunes U provides a download service for lectures and resources from universities around the world.
Top universities from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in the US to Oxford and Cambridge in the UK have been making their materials available, with no charge to the user.
There have been 31 million downloads of OU materials, more than any other university, representing roughly 10% of all iTunes U downloads. Nearly 90% of these users are from outside the UK.
In this online era, the OU student is also getting younger. A quarter of students are aged under-25 and only 10% are aged 50 or over. That change can only be accelerated as the cost of going to university increases in many countries.
The prospect of learning from Harvard from your own bedroom is getting closer.
Grassroots colleges But it's not the elite universities where the idea of online study is going to make its biggest impact, suggests Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's US-based vice-president of worldwide education.

Harvard v Yale: Both universities have put free course materials online to be used by anyone

"When talking to folks in places like Dubai and China I thought that the questions and the admiration would be for institutions like Harvard and Stanford.
"However, the actual part of the US education system that is most envied, that other institutions are trying to replicate, is the community college system in the US, founded on a belief that a degree and opportunity are rights for all citizens. And we have got to enable the population of students attending higher education to scale up.
"One of the things about the community college system in the US - Miami Dade College for example - is that it is very connected to employment and the workforce. Continued