The Democratization of Higher Education in the 21st Century

October 29, 2014

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October 29, 2014 – It occurred to me that I am part of a phenomenon in the 21st century that can only have happened because of the invention of the Internet – freely distributed information to advance knowledge. I’m not saying this blog rates with the open culture movement that offers online university courses and peer-reviewed research papers for free. I am admitting, however, that I use such tools to advance my own knowledge on subject matter and all it costs me is time and my monthly Internet service provider subscription fee.

In an online posting this week I read that more than 50% of peer-reviewed research papers published between 2007 and 2012 are now freely accessible on the Internet. Think about that. These journal papers represent scientific research in a wide range of fields from biomedicine to earth sciences, and from chemistry to cosmology. Biomedical research papers are most accessible with 71% openly posted online. Research institutes and universities in Brazil and The Netherlands are most willing to share their papers online at 76% and 74% respectively.

Now there is a website launched in the last week that allows you to find published papers and get them for free. It is called the Open Access Button. You download the application and while doing research, if you uncover a paper requesting payment, push the button which you place in your web browser bookmarks or on your tablet or smartphone and the application searches for an accessible web version of the paper that costs nothing.

Then there is Open Culture, a website that offers 1,000 free online courses from top universities including Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and Oxford. You can take courses in a wide range of subjects from business to the humanities, from law, to science and engineering.

Go to the Open Culture site. Take a test drive and click on a course. I did. I scrolled down to Aerospace – Space Flight Mechanics and discovered 45 YouTube videos offering an introductory course developed at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, a school founded in 1951 in Kharagpur, West Bengal. From the opening lecture you are given the prerequisites to understand what will be taught and advised on suggested reading material. Accessible from any Internet device whether smartphone or computer, anyone can tap into the knowledge being disseminated here.

Imagine learning general biology and then going on to study molecular biology and genetics. And then using yourOpen Access Button reading the most important peer reviewed papers on these subjects, all for free.

We live in an extraordinary time. The barriers to learning have been broken and they go far beyond Google or Bing search. We now have access to the accumulated higher learning of humankind. If we use it wisely we can all participate in tackling and beating the challenges humanity faces in this century.