Dive Summary:
- Michael J. Saylor's nonprofit online university Saylor.org aggregates free online learning resources from sources such as MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses and compiles free lines of study for students to pursue.
- The site uses video, textbooks and other media to build courses with a mission to make its offerings free.
- Saylor.org has posted 21 courses since May, with three courses available on Google's Course Builder platform, according to Sean Connor, the Saylor Foundation's community-engagement manager.
From the article:
"... Saylor's model is to offer students a free, one-stop shop for self-paced college courses. Saylor.org aggregates free content offered by open-source providers like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses, and groups it so that students can pursue a continuous sequence of courses in a major.
The model takes a different approach than that of high-profile providers of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, mainly in its role as an aggregator of online content into comprehensive courses. Instead of following a professor through a series of video lectures and peer-graded exercises on Coursera, for example, students in Saylor courses read, listen to, and watch material from different sources and grade themselves using answer keys. ..."