 All this, and more, spells university outreach on a mega scale.
World-renowned information technology specialist, educator and visionary, Professor Hal Abelson from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), put the case for these developments - which at first seem a radical departure from the increasingly common 'business' model of the modern university - during a recent visit hosted by La Trobe University.
Delivering a seminar on educational technology and institutional change on the main Melbourne campus at Bundoora, he said that since 2001 MIT has been a global pioneer and exponent of 'Open Courseware'.
MIT now publishes material from some 900 of its courses free of charge for use worldwide (Spanish and Chinese speakers are translating some of the courses) and has research and education alliances with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cambridge University and the University of Singapore.
'Giving away courses has turned out to be a much better business decision for MIT,' Professor Abelson said. 'It was not about altruism, but leadership. Course materials can usually not be sold for much, but giving them away has helped us achieve strong support from the community and from foundations.'
MIT's core business, he said, was on-site education, charging students not for course content, but for their interaction with staff who are research leaders in their fields, for learning, and for certification of that learning.
He said the advent of information technology and the information economy has sown confusion about the role of the University as a public institution and 'civilising' force in society. Some people today saw universities simply as factories that produce educational content.
Dreams by many universities of making money from selling course material online - unless they were primarily in the business of remote of distance education - were illusory. 'If universities just want to sell stuff on the web, then they should become publishing companies,' he said.
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, Hal Abelson is co-director of the 'MIT- Microsoft iCampus Alliance' in educational technology and co-head of MIT's Council on Educational Technology, which coordinates these developments. He is also a founding member of 'Creative Commons', Public Knowledge and the Free Software Foundation.
Other developments in educational technology discussed by Professor Abelson included 'active classroom learning' and strengthening the public mission of universities through 'intellectual commons'. These, he said, offered greater knowledge sharing, while 'creative commons' maintained flexible copyright protection and freedom for authors, artists and educators in the face of increasingly restrictive legislation.
He also outlined new ways of institutional collaboration made possible by web services and other information technology, thereby creating and supporting an 'extended university community'.
Head of La Trobe Computer Science and Computer Engineering, Associate Professor Samar Singh, said La Trobe was pleased to be able to host Professor Abelson's visit and help expose students, staff and other Australian educators to his ideas.
Professor Ian Robinson, who heads La Trobe's School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, said his school was examining plans to affiliate with MIT's extended campus network, through an 'Australian Hub' when this is set up.
'We are keen to go ahead with co-operative projects to generally share our knowledge and teaching resources. In particular, we are keen to take on board and extend the ideas of active learning to set up a more 'active' learning culture, and contribute to projects and laboratory facilities on the web.'
This, Professor Robinson said, may eventually help replace large lectures where students passively absorb information, with new active learning laboratories, where shorter instruction sessions are followed by students carrying out supervised interactive hands-on computer simulations.
'Initially this could be ideal for some large lectures, in subjects like physics, where MIT research has already demon-strated clear learning benefits, and possibly in other fields, where active learning results are still being assessed.'
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