The power of the Internet means that one person can often reach a very large audience. That was the case with Salman Khan, who was trying to help his cousin with math back in 2004. When his family and friends learned how well the tutoring was going, Khan turned to YouTube -- and from there, demand for his services grew exponentially. By 2009 he had quit his job. And today, the Khan Academy has more than 80 people working for it.
At one time Khan was focused on mathematics and related fields, but now the non-profit organization -- which still offers its courses for free -- has a wealth of information available on it. You can learn about computer programming, global hstory, entrepreneurship, and getting ready for tests such as the GMAT. And in its decade on the Internet, Khan has forged some powerful partnerships with organizations such as the British Museum, NASA and the California Academy of Sciences.
There's a surging demand for education as the demand for jobs grow and the market shrinks. Even having a bachelor's degree is not enough for most places, any more, forcing students into masters programs or into co-ops to gain more experience. That all comes at a great cost for time, money and effort, adding to the load of student debt even before they can enter the workplace. Some observers believe that self-education will be the next big revolution, and that before long students will turn there first rather than shelling out thousands of dollars for an education.
That's not to say that traditional institutions are staying on the sidelines. Many universities now offer a portion of their content for free, with the understanding that getting their good name out to the marketplace is good in terms of attracting media attention, sponsorship or perhaps even students who choose to eventually go to the institution and pay for content.
MIT OpenCourseWare, for example, virtually opened its doors in 2002 with just 50 courses. By the next year, its content had grown by tenfold and soon afterwards, it adopted a Creative Commons license and began encouraging other institutions to work with it. These days, there are more than one million people accessing its site, which has more than 2,000 courses available. The vast majority of the audience comes from self-learners and students.
A number of other institutions have united under a program called Coursera, which has courses from more than 115 organizations and other institutions participating. Some of the places you can take courses from there include Stanford University, Yale University and Princeton University. And like Khan and MIT, all of these courses are available for free.
The convenience of these courses cannot be overstated -- you can watch at your convenience and finish at your own pace for free, to begin with -- but one large challenge of them is certification. Will employers accept the fact that you watched a computer programming course rather than going to an institution? That depends on the institution. Some of these courses offer online certificates that showed that you have completed the course, but in traditional organizations the certification may not exactly be accepted. This means that some people may find it more useful to supplement their degrees with this knowledge rather than replace it.
There also is the question of honesty. As the Oxford Royale Academy observes, it is quite possible for a student to dishonestly ask somebody else to take the course on a student's behalf. "In theory, nobody would know if a student were to take the credit for a course they’ve paid someone else to take for them using their identity, and this would put them at an unfair advantage in the job market – and potentially lead to qualifications from online courses being discredited by employers even for those who’ve taken them honestly," they wrote.
It's far too early to say if universities feel threatened by the rise of online learning, but there is the potential for at least supplementing traditional learning with what is online. Countless professors use online courses as a supplement for the material offered in the classroom, which is important to a new generation of students who are used to searching information on YouTube and similar learning. Perhaps the best potential for online learning comes for adults who are already in the workplace and looking to pick up new skills to improve their prospects for promotion. Where do you think online learning will take us?
Top photo: Wikimedia Commons
