Unlocking the Gates by Taylor Walsh Princeton University Press HK$240
Think of how much of your daily business is done via the internet. So can we get a university education - or at least part of one - online too?
Opening the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses tells of seven online courseware initiatives - their history, objectives, effectiveness, and so on - and discusses their values and implications.
The earliest initiatives were Fathom, a for-profit endeavour by a group of universities (including Columbia and the London School of Economics) as well as institutions such as the British Library and Cambridge University Press, and AllLearn, a not-for-profit initiative by Oxford, Stanford and Yale.
These two initiatives aimed to expand the institutions' realm of higher education to the internet - virgin territory at the time of their establishment - thereby setting themselves up as industry leaders. But these early conglomerate experiments failed - they lasted for three and four years respectively - and the moral was that individuals were unlikely to pay much for 'interest courses' online, despite their high quality.
All subsequent initiatives are still in operation, and all but one serve the differing needs of individual US schools. MIT's OpenCourseWare disseminates contents of all of its regular courses - in some cases, complete lecture notes and readings; in others, just course syllabi - online, free, as its primary purpose is to enhance MIT's reputation as a premier institution.
Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative is designed both as an educational and research tool; it explores how information technology can aid education based on cognitive science principles. Open Yale Courses takes a different route from MIT's model in that it offers only select courses - focusing on the humanities, Yale's traditional strength. But materials for these courses are not just taken from regular classroom courses; rather, they are tailor-made with an online audience in mind. Courses are designed such that users 'get as close as possible to having a full Yale College course'.