E-Learning and Online Teaching

Entrepreneurs are always learning. Whether it’s through reading or watching a mentor work, learning how to do business better is a fundamental part of running a company.

So it’s little wonder many courses in the latest trend of free education are aimed squarely at entrepreneurs. While some may still view free, online courses with a sense of derision, the truth is these resources are quality sources of knowledge.

Now that Stanford, Harvard and other top American universities are offering free online courses, will students one day be able to get course credits and degrees online from these schools without having to pay for it?

John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, says his school "can see moving in that direction."

ALISON Free Online Courses: Free Online Courses, Workplace Skills Training, Interactive Education and Multimedia Learning

Since our launch in April 2007 50M+ free lessons have been delivered, learners have spent 2M+ hours studying 400+ Free courses in 10+ Course Categories, and praise has been attracted from some remarkable sources:

Enroll in any Udacity class for free!

Below is a list of our current course offerings. All of our courses are open enrollment, which means you can sign up any time and complete the course at your own pace without homework or quiz deadlines. For our premiere courses, a new unit will be posted once every week starting the 25th of June, for seven weeks. If a premiere course has already started, you are still encouraged to sign up for the course and complete it at your own pace.

We offer a final exam for all courses every eight weeks. After passing the final exam Udacity will send you a certificate of completion for your course. If you have any questions about courses or scheduling read more here.

Bookboon.com provides 1000+ free ebooks. You can download textbooks, business books and travel guides in PDF format without registration. The books are financed by a few in-book ads. Bookboon.com is the biggest eBook publisher in the world.

Academic Earth offers free access to video courses and academic lectures from leading colleges and universities.

The university, which pioneered massive open online courses, unveils two new homegrown software platforms to host the courses.

L.A. Cicero

Fall quarter's free online courses cover a wide range of fields including computer science, mathematics, linguistics, science writing, sociology and education.

Sixteen courses and two new platforms for interactive learning will highlight Stanford's free online offerings this fall, with more to follow during winter and spring quarters.

Laura Gibbs: Plagiarism means that students are not learning. If Coursera is committed to providing a good learning experience for students in the course, then it needs to intervene with a student who is plagiarizing, making sure the student understands what it means to do original work and why that is crucial to the learning experience. This, for me, is actually the most important reason that something has to be done about this - and far better, of course, if something is done proactively, rather than after a student has plagiarized. Now that Coursera knows plagiarism is a potential problem in a course with these types of writing assignments, some kind of plagiarism education needs to take place before the writing assignments begin. In our class, that plagiarism education needs to happen ASAP.

Dennis O'Connor:  For anyone interested in teaching students how to recognize plagiarism, and create proper citations consider the 21cif Plagiarism Detection Kits: http://www.diigo.com/list/wiredinstructor/plagiarism_games

Those of us interested in exploring the myriad free courses available online will appreciate the work being done at P2PU. It’s perhaps a funny name when you first say it out loud, but P2PU's approach and original learning content are for real.

Their idea is that taking an online course should be more like learning on the job than taking a traditional class. Their approach encourages people to work together on projects—whether learning computing programming or something else—and to assess one another’s work with constructive feedback.

ALISON Free Online Courses: Online Digital Literacy & IT Skills Training Courses and Certification...

This video provides an excellent conceptual overview of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  ~ Dennis

Written and Narrated by Dave Cormier
Video by Neal Gillis

Researchers:
Dave Cormier
Alexander McAuley
George Siemens
Bonnie Stewart

Created through funding received by the University of Prince Edward Island through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's "Knowledge Synthesis Grants on the Digital Economy"

There are literally hundreds of free courses online — offered by some of the most prestigious universities in the world — that don't require registration. We've picked out 10 that we think you'll find particularly interesting, and included course descriptions and links to where you can watch or download them free of charge.

Saylor.org is a free and open collection of college level courses. There are no registrations or fees required to take our courses, and you will earn a certificate upon completion of each course. Because we are not accredited, you will not earn a college degree or diploma; however, our team of experienced college professors has designed each course so you will be able to achieve the same learning objectives as students enrolled in traditional colleges.

We've picked out 15 open education resources that we find to be the most impressive and inspiring out there.