In the four years that his modern-poetry course has been offered free online, Langdon Hammer, a professor of English at Yale University, has gotten a kick out of the e-mails he has received from students around the world.
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“Every week or so I get a message from someone somewhere who’s listening to the lectures and wants to get in touch,” Mr. Hammer says. There was the man who downloaded his lectures onto a DVD so his father could listen while he jogged on the treadmill, the poet in Iran who said the lectures inspired her own teaching, and the friends who thanked him for making their morning commutes a little less stressful.
Then one day an e-mail arrived with a subject line that read “yak herder in Tibet.”
“That one really stood out,” Mr. Hammer says.
It was from Skal Bzang Tse Brtan, who grew up herding yaks in a nomadic Tibetan community. The 26-year-old, who goes by “Gago,” composed poetry in his native language during the hours spent crisscrossing the alpine grasslands that swayed in the springtime and froze in the winter.
When he was 14, his parents sold their herd so he could attend school, but he missed the nomadic way of life that was becoming threatened as the grasslands disappeared. Now he leads cultural-preservation and education projects in the region where he grew up. He stumbled on Yale’s open classes after seeing a reference on a Chinese Web site, and before long he was spending his evenings poring over lessons in “Philosophy of Love in the Western World,” basic HTML, and modern poetry.
“I can read and write a little bit in Tibetan before I went to school, so I read stories, poems, and love songs while I was herding yaks. I got a lot fun but of course I couldn’t got many books. I started to write poem and love songs in the middle school,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle.
“In my home area, it is very difficult to study English with native speakers, but I am so happy that I can study modern poetry online with Prof Langdon Hammer in English by free through the Yale’s open course.”
At a time when higher-education costs are soaring beyond the reach of many people, millions of students worldwide are tapping into free courses offered by such institutions as Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and start-ups like Peer 2 Peer University and Saylor.org.
MIT, which started making its course materials available online in 2002 and now offers lecture notes, exams, and videos from 2,100 undergraduate and graduate classes, estimates that 125 million people have looked at its course content since 2003. While it’s tough to pin down how many actually complete a course, about 20 percent of the viewers who responded to a recent MIT survey said they had finished at least one, according to Stephen E. Carson, a spokesman for MIT OpenCourseWare.
Meanwhile, Apple’s free iTunes U program, through which much of the open courseware available today is posted, has logged 700 million downloads of course material since 2007, according to a company spokesman. A new iTunes U application that Apple introduced in January to make it easier to take open courses was downloaded three million times in the first month.
Stanford, one of the universities that posts courses on iTunes U, reported last month that its audio and video course lectures had been downloaded 50 million times from the Apple site, and that engineering courses are the most popular.
Open courses offered through iTunes or directly by universities often remain online for five or six years. As the courses, and the technology that supports them, have become more sophisticated, materials have expanded from simple audio podcasts to include videotaped lectures, assigned readings, computer-graded tests, and optional study groups (see chart on Page B7). MIT’s newest platform, MITx, and Udacity, a new company founded by a Stanford professor to offer free online courses, are both taking the open-courseware movement a step further, offering credentials to students who successfully complete courses.
“This is a big leap forward this model of education is taking,” says Dan Colman, director of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program and lead editor of an online archive of free educational resources called Open Culture. “For the first time, students are getting a holistic experience that comes close to matching what they would get in a traditional classroom,” he says.
Julius J. Davis turned to open courseware because he was floundering in physics during his freshman year at George Washington University. A friend suggested he seek help online. “My professor would put equations on the board or shove a PowerPoint in your face, but he wouldn’t explain things,” says Mr. Davis (left, with fellow student Pavan Jagannathan), now a sophomore engineering major. “I passed the course, but I wasn’t satisfied with the amount I had learned.”
He went to the Internet, plugged classical mechanics and physics into the search engine, “and I ended up at MIT in Walter Lewin’s classical-mechanics class. That’s where I had some ‘aha!’ moments when it started to make sense,” he says.
Mr. Davis took the course during the summer after his freshman year, squeezing in video lectures during breaks in his internship with a nonprofit foundation. He especially enjoyed the professor’s videotaped demonstrations in which he’d twirl around with a bucket of water or transform himself into a human pendulum to demonstrate principles of physics. “What makes open courseware so easy is that if I don’t catch something, I can go back and rewind it until I understand.”
Neil D’Souza, a Cisco engineer turned social entrepreneur, has perhaps the most ambitious use of open courseware. He’s been bringing lessons from Khan Academy and other open-courseware companies to orphanages and soup kitchens in Mongolia through a group he founded, Teach A Class.
Working with local volunteers who translate the lessons, he makes the material available through portable servers that are small enough to fit in backpacks. These “education hot spots” allow people to see materials hosted on the server even in areas where the Internet isn’t available.
Among the beneficiaries is a woman who runs a soup kitchen in Ulaanbaatar for children who don’t go to school. The 25 donated computers were gathering dust because no one knew what to do with them and no Internet access was available. “Now she asks every kid who comes in for warm soup to sit down at a computer for 30 minutes and learn something,” Mr. D’Souza says.
His group has also introduced open courseware in math, science, and English to children living in two Mongolian orphanages, as well as children in a Mongolian school (left) and in other developing countries.
Wendy Ermold has used open courseware to study in one of the world’s most remote locations—in her case, during three-week research trips to Ellesmere Island, off the northern tip of Canada near the Arctic Circle. Ms. Ermold (right), a scientific programmer at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, spends about five hours a week tuning in to lectures in quantum physics, machine learning, and computational science and engineering on her iPad. The lectures, by professors at MIT, Stanford, and other universities, provide bedtime viewing during her nights in the military-base housing. Many of the lessons have proved directly applicable to the work she does writing programs and analyzing ocean currents. “I don’t have time to sit down and read through a textbook, but watching these videos is amazingly helpful,” she says.
Instructional videos posted by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry have helped dentists halfway around the world brush up on their dental procedures. Lt. Raymond Tinucci (right), a dentist assigned with the U.S. Navy to a medical-training team in Afghanistan, had some of the videos translated into Dari, a dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan. The videos, distributed to Kabul Medical University and the Afghan National Army, were used to help start a training program for dental assistants working in rural areas.
While many people turn to open courseware to learn new skills or fill their free time, others rely on the lessons to keep their jobs. Charles Reynes (right, with Meadow Cook, a fourth grader) is an elementary-school science teacher in California’s Castro Valley Unified School District who has won national and state awards for his teaching. But Mr. Reynes, a former accountant, wasn’t formally certified to teach science. “The school board made an exception for me every year, but after winning those awards, I thought I should become legit,” he says. After hearing that the state science test was tough for someone who hadn’t majored in the subject, he browsed the Internet and came across a free course, offered by the University of California at Irvine, that prepares teachers to pass the credential test. “I plowed through the lectures, and when there was something I didn’t completely understand, I looked it up at the Khan Academy site,” says Mr. Reynes. He passed the test on his first try.
