I have been thinking about "online education" for a while, its future, especially knowing how much of a topic it has been for a while, to Bill gates publicly stating that the future of education is moving online. He has also shown how much he cares about strengthening online education by publicly pouring his heart about Khan Academy and Academic earth.
It only makes you think about the future of education, not only because of Bill Gates statements, but to pause for a moment on the new direction in which education is currently heading towards at the moment.
Should online education be pursued rather the more the more constructural education process, which is cutting a big hole in our pockets as we know, especially with the increase of Tuition fees for all UK Universities and also the large amount of money it costs to go to college in the states.
I'm sure not that everyone wants to start learning online yet if ever, There are some people that feel it all makes sense, I am sure most people are just fine going to university and learning, but you can't argue that online education costs so much less.
I got into a conversation with a friend of mine a while ago on facebook, and most of his argument was that going to university/college did not just teach students academically but instead provided them with real-life experiences and if online education was to be introduced as the more reliant way of education, most people would be lost in the world.
That university gives most people, the opportunity to find themselves, make friends and build contacts for the working world. He argued that university/college is more than education, the overall experience is = Growing from a child to Man/Woman.
My argument was that i know a lot of people that have great jobs from practical experiences, had enough times to find themselves and gone to enough networking events to build that important contact list. If you look at it both ways, it works, it all depends on the individual on what they feel comfortable doing.
I just think we are different people that choose different things, different paths and different ways of life. i do not believe that online education should become the focal point of education or the other kind of education which i will call 'offline education', i think both of them existing will only just give different people different options in life that's all.
I also decided to also put a list 10 of those websites that are leading new revolution of online education.
Let me know your thoughts about the topic in the comment section.
Academic earth
Richard Ludlow launched Academic Earth on March 24, 2009, it offers free online video lectures from universities such as as UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.
Khan academy
The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization created by Salman Khan. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the Academy supplies a free online collection of over 2,000 videos on mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics
YouTube EDU
It contains videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events.
TED
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It began in 1984 as an annual conference devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design -- hence TED -- but TED's reach, and its scope, have become ever broader since then. TEDTalks cover science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more.
Video Lectures
The website offers free online courses with more than 18000 videos, 740 Online University Courses.
Fora.tv
It gathers the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates at universities, think tanks and conferences.
Video Lectures
VideoLectures.NET is a free and open access educational video lectures repository.
Learners Tv
This site provides free video/audio lectures of whole courses conducted by faculty from reputed universities around the world.
TeacherTube.com provides an online community for sharing instructional teacher videos, it allows teachers to share educational resources such as video, audio, documents, photos, groups and blogs. As of October 2010, TeacherTube has over 725,000+ educational members and over 200,000 educational videos.
School Tube
SchoolTube.com is a website dedicated to student video and media sharing for entertainment and classroom use.
