Alert: Traditional Education Systems are Becoming Obsolete. Part II.

As I previously said, this is the second part of the post about the big changes that are happening in the education systems around the world.

We shouldn’t be surprised if every day new students at their university lectures know more stuff than their teachers. This can occur particularly in classes related to computer programming, systems engineering or computational science and engineering.

In many cases, the students complement the teacher’s knowledge. This is due to the existence of a huge number of tutorials, manuals and courses available for free on the web, which are very user friendly and that can teach us about a vast variety of topics.

We can find content for anyone and everyone.

Here are a couple examples:

youtube.com/edu: Hundreds of universities and institutes have a channel on this site. Here, you can access relevant content and share it with others.

freesciencelectures.com: The name is pretty self-explanatory. On this site you can find science related videos and lectures.

ecorner.stanford.edu: For the entrepreneur that lives inside you, Stanford University shares podcasts and videos of entrepreneurial thought leaders and innovators from Silicon Valley.

oyc.yale.edu: Yale University has also available lectures of Philosophy, English, Physics, Economy, Engineering, just to mention a few.

itunes u: You can access this section through the itunes store. It contains more than 100,000 educational files: audio and video.

It seems that we’ll be lacking time because there’s infinte content.

Alert: Traditional Education Systems are Becoming Obsolete. Part I.

I could practically guarantee that any and every type of knowledge and information is or will be available in the palm of our hands and free of charge on the web.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit is the most popular encyclopedia on the web and was created only 8 years ago (2001), it has about 2’877,700 articles only in English.

This encyclopedia receives between 10,000 and 30,000 page petitions per second. Let’s now imagine how it will be 10 years from now, I doubt there’ll be something that we couldn’t find on this site.

The four official logos used by Wikipedia since its birth.

Everyday new valuable content is added to the internet. Several universities, educational and cultural institutes share important documents, videos, texts, even complete university courses on video, (it’s just as if you were seated in the classroom just beside your classmates and a few meters from the teacher). Besides, these courses are given by the best universities in the world.

Such is the case of Academic Earth, a website in which you can find courses related to Psychology, Law, History, Physics, Political Science, and much more subjects from universities such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and everything is FREE.

Now there are no excuses, today more than ever, knowledge is in the palm of our hands.

I’ll come back to the subject with a future post and more websites that make education and knowledge available for every human being with an internet connection.