Monday, May 31, 2010

Einztein - Find FREE Online Courses!



"Openness plants seeds for future innovation. The work of many universities around open content has contributed to an ecosystem for innovation. Einztein is the latest company to try and add a value layer to freely available educational material. More and more of these companies will appear in the near future offering a combination of aggregation of open content, a central place to discover courses, tools to run aggregate courses, discussion forums for learners, and general course management tools (enrolling, sharing with other profs, grading, etc.). " - George Siemens



WHAT?
Einztein, a non-profit headquartered in Santa Monica, California, is the brainchild of three democratizers of education who believe in a world where learning should be a function of desire not privilege. Einztein serves as a one-stop campus from which online learners can easily explore the universe of free online courses delivered by any combination of text, audio, video and other media. Whether you already know the course you’re looking for, or you just have a general idea, the purpose of Einztein is to make online courses easy to find. All courses featured on Einztein are hand picked, by their PhD level editorial team, based on their completeness and quality (Source).

In short, Einztein is a great starting point to find free quality online courses. Though, I would like to note that I did find broken course links and courses with no substantial content, so the editorial team needs be 'more picky'. Perhaps, include a few non-PhD level e-learning professionals (such as myself...) to ensure more completeness and quality :)

No comments: