article on entrepreneurship/technology in higher ed.

[Greg Tananbaum <gtananbaum@gmail.com>]

Fast Company has a very interesting piece on how technical 
innovations such as open courseware are attempting "to bridge the 
gap between free material and cheap education".  Among the 
provocative passages:

Today, "open content" is the biggest front of innovation in 
higher education. The movement that started at MIT has spread to 
more than 200 institutions in 32 countries that have posted 
courses online at the OpenCourseWare Consortium. But, as Wiley 
[co-founder of a not-for-profit, online public charter high 
school that draws on open courseware] points out, there's still a 
big gap between viewing such resources as a homework aid and 
building a recognized, accredited degree out of a bunch of 
podcasts and YouTube videos. "Why is it that my kid can't take 
robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at 
Stanford? And why can't we put 130 of those together and make it 
a degree?" Wiley asks. "There are all these kinds of innovations 
waiting to happen. A sufficient infrastructure of freely 
available content is step one in a much longer endgame that 
transforms everything we know about higher education." Definitely 
worth a read for many list members.

Best, Greg