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Shortly on online learning [updated]

During 90s there was a vision to commence online courses. During the time such idea wasn't really feasible as the most common connection was 56 kbit/s modems. They must have used only texts. However, only 20 years later, i.e. today, the situation totally turned. Nowadays, with 35% of population connected to the Internet and growing penetration of fast connection, we should really rethink the situation in education.

We are in an incredible position. It is not anymore question of the future technologies - at the moment we have all the tools we need to start an online course. And they are for free.  Youtube, Google Hangouts, Google Community are good examples. Moreover all that is made easier with a wide spread of English as a second language in the world. Finally books are becoming easily available online. 

This is just a couple of ideas. Altogether it could obviously extremely push and drive the innovation and moreover have vast impact on quality of life on this planet. This is very exciting.

In fact, most likely, I am not one of the last person getting "conventional" full time university education.There is a strong inertia in our habits and of course nostalgia*. It will take decades for people to at least partly accept it and to abandon this conventional model. Afterall it is definitely not the end of the universities, only a new phase.

Update 3

But it isn't only the advanced courses at universities which . Indeed, it is obvious that elementary and high schools are not really replacable by online course because they at least partly act as a "babysitting" institutions. But! And that is what I am really excited, new technologies could be an amazing help. Salman Khan with his Khan Academy which is currently ran in number of elementary schools turn learning into kind of RPG (but originally was ment for self-learners). You get rewards for your achievements and kind of level up :-). I love that! 

The problem is that now we are not even able to solve problems we should have coped with twenty years ago. The government is always not 1 but 100 steps behind. Today, they are trying to invest into computer equipment in schools while majority of the kids have own notebooks, or even tablets. We teach them to use Word or Excel but not how they could learn it themselves on the Internet.

Actually, the inspiration to write about online education was signing into free MIT's "Learning Creative Learning". They offer this great course worldwide for free starting online on Monday February 11th. It is their first venture and it is supposed to be based on "off the shelve" Google technologies I mentioned above. I fancy it is going to be great. (Join me if you want, my code is 7011.) 

I am curious how they are going to handle it as ,only now, there is more than 1400 participants signed for the course.

Finally, if you have more time I recommend www.udacity.com . It is very popular and offering very interesting courses (artificial intelligence, Statistics, etc. ).

Update 1

There is much more already offered on the internet other example is www.coursera.org . It is incredible - in total 221 courses are offered completely free of charge. Amazing talk discussing problems but also advantages of that project and online learning in general was given by Daphne Koller from Standford.

*At the end I must write I wasn't critical enough towards the ideas I mentioned above. The truth is that it is probably not that straight forward as I pictured it. It is certainly suitable only for certain type of courses. Finally we must break clichés with bearing in mind that not all what is old is for sure obsolete.

Update 2

I put together a list of TED talks(do you know TED?) regarding these topics. 

What I love about TED that there is a great (and concise) discussion in comments to the topic so you see all the points of view and can make really objective opinion.

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