Open your browser, type the key word, and wallop; you get your information and that too in hoards. Welcome to the new age of technology. Information rests at the click of a button. Sounds interesting and preposterous, but it is true. Free teaching resources are as real and it is sounding.
There was a section of internet users who complained in the era of web 1.0 that information available on the net were garbage. May be they were right but not anymore. Today, there are sites, and various organizations working feverishly, day and night to make the content of the net as valuable as possible. Be it the government organizations, or be it the private organizations, all are working towards creating net enabled free teaching resource materials to be accessed anywhere.
Various technologies were involved in making the availability of free teaching resources available.
Teaching resources may be classified as the reading material, the writing material, the knowledge sound bytes, the video, animation, or a combination of all these. There are many sites, which provide e books in various formats, such as PDF files, Djvu files, which makes online reading fun and exciting. It will make you feel as if you are reading the real book.
Similarly, there are a lot of audio libraries, such as Librivox, which convert real books into audio books. Similarly, various ambitious projects are being carried all over the world to create very large knowledge bases. The artificial library, Project Alexandria is one such project.
But, perhaps the most important work in free teaching resources is the free donation of teaching materials by reputed institutions and universities, such as Oxford, Harward, Stanford, MIT and our very own IITs.
MIT was the first institution to start the OCW project. The open course ware project is a project to place in the public domain a list of all the education that is being taught in the MIT. This is a very philanthropic effort, and a great example to follow.
Recently, Indian institutes of technology did the same. They recently launched the NPETL channel on you tube, and have uploaded more than 40000 hours of free teaching resource materials. The teaching materials are in the live class room lecture format which can be seen in easy to watch audio video format of one hour, more or even less.
These movements and works are changing the web like anything. Today, with the cheap and easy availability of net connectivity facilities, they have become an important source of information and communication. They have penetrated our lives to such an extent, that it feels strange, how we managed to live without it in the past.
With the emergence of cloud computing, the web is becoming even better and better. Distant learning would become so formidable, that it will rival the campus education.
Today free teaching resources have become a very important tool to impart education in the 3rd world countries. It saves them the cost of books, and costly libraries. The books can be downloaded, and pages photocopied as per the requirements. Thanks to the emergence of the net, the world is finally changing and that too for good.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Thomas_Radcliff
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