Accessibility. Accessibility is the beauty of the internet in today’s day and age. Without the burgeoning success of the internet, we would not have as knowledgable a society as we have today. Restraints are taken off of learning with developments such as the DIgital Public Library of America, P2PU, and Open Culture. Never before has such a broad spectrum of people been able to access literature, and educational courses from all around the world.
Open Culture:
What is one of the biggest issues with attending university for four years? One may not be able to explore as wide an array of classes as they so desire due to time constraints, or monetary reasons. With U.C. Berkley, Yale, and Stanford now uploading lecture content to sites such as iTunes, it accommodates student’s desires to learn outside of their major. U.C. Berkley itself has over 120 million uploads of lecture material for their students. This extra access allows for a generally more well rounded student populous. What “Open Culture” itself is, is the largest free educational database developed by Dan Colman PHD (Stanford Graduate 1997). This database offers over 350 free courses, and thousands of hours of educational audio content. This kind of information was much more difficult to garner in the pre-internet era.
“I’m trying to bring the best food ideas to the rest of the world. There currently exists too much of a gap between university world and the general public.”- Dr. Dan Colaman
P2PU: (Peer to Peer University)
“a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements.” – John Britton
John Britton is the developer of P2PU, and a dropout of RPI university. His goal was to develop an open education network on the internet where people could learn from each other. This provides for an open network of people to interact with each-other and share their knowledge. This type of medium is helpful in today’s age of the internet.
Link to P2PU video: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/05/14/how-the-internet-is-revolutionizing-education/
The internet has provided an extensive amount of easily accessible free information for the general public. These new mediums of accessing information gives our society more free opportunities to learn than ever before, which provides for well-rounded people.