Want to learn about the history of modern China from a professor who has taught at Dartmouth since 1985? Until Thursday, your best bet was probably to cough up some serious SAT scores and even more serious tuition. Now Udemy is giving you access to an online courses by professors with such qualifications -- for free.
The startup online learning platform launched a new site called "The Faculty Project" Thursday that offers free course content from professors.
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The site's first 15 courses include teachers from Stanford, Yale, Northwestern and Dartmouth. When users enroll for a course on Thursday, they'll be emailed when the professor adds new lessons to it. After the course is finished, all lessons will remain on the site for anyone to complete at his or her own pace.
Professors use the same course creation tool Udemy offers on its main site to create the courses. With it they can drag and drop video, PowerPonts, PDFs, MP3s, documents, articles, pictures, Zip files and pretty much any other kind of media into their courses. Unlike Udemy's main site, which Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani says sold $1 million of courses last year, all Faculty Project courses will be free.
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"We want people to know that this is the one-stop shop for OpenCourseWare," Tim Parks, the director of the Faculty Project, says.
Udemy isn't the only organization with its eye on this goal. MIT announced last month that it would begin to expand its free online library of MIT course lectures into a platform for teaching full courses. While plenty of universities put their course materials online, MIT made it clear that it has its eye outside of just MIT and said it would offer the platform for other schools to use.
Meanwhile, Apple dropped a bomb into the OpenCourseWare space when it launched the iBooks Author App last week. The app allows anyone to author their own interactive textbooks -- which can include videos and presentations -- and to distribute them through iBooks.
Though both MIT and Apple have recently made moves to include content from more educators, Biyani says Udemy is still the most open choice at the moment.
"We believe education should be open for everyone," he says, "not just people who can afford an expensive device."
Likewise, MIT hasn't yet opened its platform to other schools, and there's no guarantee it will allow just any post-secondary institution be a part of it when it does. At the moment, Udemy is closer to being a place where any professor can share his or her knowledge.
But to be honest, it doesn't really matter what becomes the dominant one-stop shop for open course material. In 2010, Bill Gates made a prediction: “It’s very clear that five years from now, on the web, for free…you will be able to find the greatest lectures in the world,” he said during an interview at Techonomy.
With three years to go, a major tech player, one of the most prestigious universities and a nimble startup are all striving toward that goal. It only takes one of them to accomplish it for all of us to win.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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