Udacity | Free Online Courses. Advance your College Education ...
and by the way this is worldwide!
Begin quote from page 33 of Time magazine of October 29, 2012:
On Sept. 17, the Pakistani Government shut down access to YouTube. The purported reason was to block the anti-Muslim film trailer that was inciting protests around the world.
One little-noticed consequence of this decision was that 215 people in Pakistan suddenly lost their seats in a massive, open online physics course. The free college level class, created by a Silicon Valley start-up called Udacity, included hundreds of short YouTube videos embedded on its website. Some 23,000 students worldwide had enrolled, including Khadijah Niazi, a pigtailed 11 year old in Lahore. She was on question six of the final exam when she encountered a curt message saying "this site is unavailable."
Niazi was devastated. She's worked hard to master this physics class before her 12th birthday, just one week away. Now what?
Niazi posted a lament on the class discussion board. "I am very angry, but I will not quit."
In every country, education changes so slowly that it can be hard to detect progress. But what happened next was truly different. Within an hour, Mazlar Kosarifar, a young man taking the class in Malaysia, began posting detailed descriptions for Niazi of the test questions in each video. Rosa Brigitia, a novice physics professor taking the class from Portugal, tried to create a workaround so Niazi could bypass YouTube: it didn't work. From England, William, 12, promised to help and warned Niazi not to write anything too negative about her government online.
None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton's laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they'd started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they'd found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren't about to let anyone lock it up.
By late that night, the Portuguese professor had successfully downloaded all the videos and then uploaded them to an uncensored photo-sharing site. It took her four hours, but it worked. The next day, Niazi passed the final exam with the highest distinction. "yayyyyyyy" she wrote in a new post. (Actually she used 43 y's, but you get the idea.) She was the youngest girl ever to complete Udacity's Physics 100 class, a challenging course for the average college freshman.
That same day, Niazi signed up for Computer Science 101 along with her twin brother Muhammed. In England, William began downloading the videos for them.
End quote page 23 of Time magazine from October 29, 2012:
So, when I found this article today I was amazed that my idea that I only thought of today on my own had already been done for thousands of students worldwide. Great Idea!
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