Article from The Economist: TOP-QUALITY teaching, stringent admissions criteria and impressive qualifications allow the world’s best universities to charge mega-fees: over $ 50,000 for a year of undergraduate study at Harvard. Less exalted providers have boomed too, with a similar model that sells seminars, lectures, exams and a “salad days” social life in a single [...]

Article from NBC 29 News: The University of Virginia is giving potential students a sneak peek of free online courses. The university has launched video previews of upcoming online learning classes offered through a partnership with Coursera. The non-credit courses are free and open to anyone with a computer and internet connection. Professors say enrollment [...]

Article from Telegraph.co.uk: Students generally receive a certificate for completing the courses, but do not receive academic credit toward any conventional degree qualification. Courses typically involve students working through set assignments online, including video lectures delivered by academics at the institutions offering the courses, before evaluating one another’s work. Specific details of the courses on [...]

Article from How to get a free Ivy League education online – TechHive: Brad Chacosbrad@chacoswritingservices.com, TechHive Brad Chacos has had a passion for gadgetry and gab ever since he was a young geek. You can find him debating the finer points of DIY PCs, BYOD tablets and PPC advertising.More by Brad Chacos Don’t let clichés [...]

Article from Pittsburgh Post Gazette: A group of online-learning ventures is collaborating on a new kind of free class to be offered this fall, known as a mechanical MOOC (for “massive open online course”), that will teach a computer-programming language by patching together existing resources from open-learning sites. Unlike courses already available online, the new [...]

Article from Businessweek: Justin Thomsen finished the first year of a philosophy master’s program at the University of California at Irvine when he began to contemplate his future. “There aren’t a lot of jobs, exactly, for being a philosopher,” he said. Thomsen decided he needed computer programming skills to find employment in his technology-focused region. [...]

Article from Business 2 Community: With the continuing shift to the Internet and all things social mobile, everybody’s talking about the necessity of online content marketing and “repurposing” existing marketing content. Though I for one am in total agreement, a parallel development in free online learning suggests we need to be thinking about repurposing our [...]

Article from Knowledge@Wharton: When Bilal Shah got his doctorate in computer science from the University of Southern California back in 2010, the job market wasn’t exactly welcoming. “I graduated into the Great Recession. Nothing would test my mettle more,” says Shah. Around that time, he heard about a free massive online open course (MOOC) on [...]

Article from Philadelphia Inquirer: It costs well over $ 50,000 a year to attend the University of Pennsylvania, but beginning in June, anyone anywhere will be able to get a sliver of that Ivy League education for free. Penn has joined a group of top universities, including Princeton, that will begin offering select courses online [...]

Article from Geekosystem: Renowned as a premiere institute of higher learning for the sundry sciences, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a new program that will bring a free version of one of its classes online. The program is called MITx, and the first of its fully automated courses kicks off this fall with 6.002x [...]