Not your average internet education

With Wikibooks and its peers came free, open-source education by and for the people. And now, with iTunes, comes the webcasted lecture. Prestigious universities like UC Berkeley and MIT (and previously Stanford, Oxford, and Yale with AllLearn) are offering webcasts--audio and sometimes video--of many of their courses, from physics to philosophy to art.

The way traditional "distance learning" courses for credit work is by combining readings and audio/video lectures with online communication through a chatroom or forum. Assignments are sent to the professor and assessed. Most of the courses available through Berkeley Webcasts and similar sites don't offer any meaningful interaction with the professor or other students, but some, like this environmental history course, provide all the salient details. The only difference from traditional DL courses is that you don't get your assignments graded.

It's not a free degree, but it IS free education as long as you have a computer, some kind of audio player, and speakers or headphones. This still excludes the poorest of the poor except through access via a library or other public internet location, but it's a pretty significant improvement in the quality of education you can get for free.

I'm doing PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence right now. I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, educate yourselves.