Web-Savvy Transforming American Higher Education

"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 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.'"