Open and free courses

Open and free courses
http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) Meets with Bill Gates
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. and co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation came to Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday, September 22, for the dedication of the Gates and Hillman Centers at the Pittsburgh campus. As part of his campus visit, Gates, accompanied by Foundation Senior Program Officer Josh Jarrett and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Anoop Gupta, met for nearly 90 minutes with the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) team to discuss the past, present, and future of the project as it moves forward under support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. CMU personnel in attendance were Provost Mark Kamlet, Vice Provost and CIO Joel Smith, Director of OLI Candace Thille, Director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center Kenneth Koedinger and OLI Senior Software Engineers John Rinderle and Bill Jerome.
A brief presentation by Thille highlighted OLI’s unique approach of applying learning science research results and methods to open course design and then collecting data to continuously improve the learning experience--a combination that has been drawing increasingly positive attention from a variety of sources. Discussion then centered around the possibilities and challenges inherent in the potential for rapid growth of the initiative, with a particular emphasis on possible ways to overcome technical, organizational, and cultural barriers to scale.
“The opportunity to discuss with Bill Gates what we’ve accomplished and get his advice first-hand is truly a privilege and an honor,” said Thille. Later that day, in his keynote address celebrating the opening of the Gates Center for Computer Science and the Hillman Center for Future Generation Technologies, Gates referred to OLI as “an amazing and critical piece of work. . . . The idea of these virtual labs and intelligent tutoring systems, I think, can really revolutionize education. And we need to revolutionize education.”