World Education University
A university that grants a degree at no
cost, a free education. You must be dreaming right? Nope, not if the World Education
University has anything
to say about it. It is introducing a new massively open online course (MOOC)
business model with a twist bound to disrupt higher education. The leaders at
the new, tuition-free university come from low income backgrounds and pride
themselves on providing a quality education.
WEU is based out of Palm Springs and opened on 1 December, 2012.
WEU is unlike most other universities in
that it focuses on training its students to become “an army of
humanitarians". “Right up front, we require [that students] agree to an ‘I
will give back’ pledge,” Scott Hines, one of the founder of WEU, said. “It’s
very short, simple, and broad, and says you’ll take this gift of free education
and agree to do good work with it.” Hines said that this “pay it forward”
mission is ingrained into every course of study.
It has seven schools or departments:
Education, Psychology, Engineering, Health Sciences, Legal Studies, and
Business.
The university operates as a
degree-granting university through third-party evaluations and exams at Excelsior College
in Albany, New York that range from $40 to $400.
Accreditation
Some may ask about the ability to verify
students and academic honesty in the completion of exams for credit. WEU plans
to use keystroke authentication technology, which will eventually move to full
facial recognition.
Personally, I feel accreditation bodies could
be a thing of the past, maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually. As with
everything else, the Internet is slowly but surely exerting its influence on
education.
This is especially apparent in the
programming world where coders and Web developers are picking up their skills
in open source forums and Code
Academy. MOOC's were a
hot trending topic in 2012 and looks set to gain even more pace.
Will accreditation still be the marker of
skill and knowledge that employers are looking for?
"Official education" that is
certified with a qualification aside, there are tons of information and
learning out there on the internet that can be used to improve yourself.
Ultimately, isn't our goal in partaking in education to learn and to make
ourselves better human beings? With that said, here are some site with great
learning opportunities. They are all FREE, and setup by people who want to make
the world a better place.
http://www.noexcuselist.com/ - A huge range
of topics from cooking to coding
http://documentaryheaven.com/ - Documentaries
to watch online
http://stackexchange.com/sites# - Group of
question and answer websites on topics in many different fields
http://lifehackninja.com/how-to-learn-a-language-using-the-internet/
- Guide on learning languages online
https://www.khanacademy.org/ - Educational
organization. The website supplies a free online collection of micro lectures
stored on YouTube teaching a broad range of school subjects
http://www.codecademy.com/ - Online
interactive platform that offers free coding classes in programming languages
like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML
and CSS.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Free e-books on
a broad number of subjects, also has foreign language book translated to
english
Spread the awesomeness people. Let's work towards a world without retards!
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