Madaar - volunteers needed!

Madaar - Open Islamic Curriculum is a project I am involved with, and we're currently looking for volunteers. If you have some time to spare - no matter how much - then get in touch, or please forward on to someone who might be interested.

Check out why you should help us here. For more about the project, take a look here. 

Links to more Open Courses

In addition to the Open Yale Courses that I mentioned in this post. Below is a list of some more. 

Class Central lists all of the free online courses available at the links below.

From the likes of Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton: https://www.coursera.org/

As mentioned in a previous post, from MIT: http://www.mitx.mit.edu/

If you know of others, please feel free to share them in the comments box below. 

Online education? You need the internet first...

Very interesting infographic from the Oxford Internet Institute on the number of internet users worldwide. It really puts into perspective global attempts at increasing access to schooling via online learning. For example, a high proportion of African countries do not even feature on the map.  

Source: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c0200/internet_penetration.png

Open Yale Courses

Another one to add to all the fantastic Open courses and resources currently available on the web.

Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

Fantastic resource. Thanks to Dr Chris Blattman for sharing. Check out the courses for yourself.

Free Online Education for All

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. 

The full article from Forbes is here. 

This article is from last year, however raises the question of whether this approach can tackle the inaccessibility of HE in developing country contexts. Pros and cons of such an approach?