That the genesis of Thomas Freidman's famous tract the The World is Flat is an innocuous statement by Nandan Nilekani is well known. But you can hear that story from Friedman himself at http://www.academicearth.org/lectures/the-world-is-flat). Welcome to the world of open courseware online.From cooking to cloud computing, from basic economics to econometric modelling of causes of global financial meltdown, a range of courses, with varied levels of depth and diversity are available at the click of the mouse. And the best part is they are all free
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The beginnings
What began as an idea to use the internet as an additional means to propagate knowledge, the first 'open courseware' initiative was launched by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. Says Prof.Harold Ableson, professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, 'The idea was to make available world class course material, so that knowledge is available to all those who seek it, without considerations of cost or copyright.' Yet another reason is the realization that making such courses available would also attract prospective students, keep alumni connected and add up to the overall stock of knowledge that is available free.

The best and the brightest
Pioneer MIT remains the best in terms of the sheer number of courses available online. The website (http://ocw.mit.edu) is a virtual repository of nearly 1800 courses (see table in page 81 for details), with about half of them having videos of lectures too. The website began with about 50 courses in 2002, with most of them having a detailed course structure, reading lists and lecture notes. But now more than 50% of the courses offer videos of lectures as well. With over one million visits per month and visitors across the world (See Map) MIT clearly is the best.

Giving, MIT a tough competition is the University of California, Berkely (UCB), which offers podcasts of a sizeable section of lectures offered in about 30 courses every semester for the last seven years. (http:// webcast.berkeley.edu ). While MIT is rich in textual content and depth, UCB scores on the ease of use. In MIT, you will have to download contents individually for each course, textual and multimedia contents separately. In UCB, just click on a course, the page opens to the course listings, and each course directly links up to the nearly 30 lectures that constitute a course. One can learn the fundamentals of biological anthropology (001, Fall 2009) to issues in foreign policy (IAS 180, spring 2002).

There are a number of institutions which offer substantial course content, with varied levels of ease of use and navigability. Stanford University's engineering (www.see.stanford.edu) though has limited content of about nine courses, some of them are world class and turn up very high on the popularity charts of aggregators. In line with the domain it specializes in, Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, (www.berkman.org) tops the YouTube channel's viewerships, so does University of California, LA. The Open University UK is another major player. Neatly organized, the Open University (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php) offers courses in arts, business, health, computing sciences, technology etc. But what stands out in the Open University offerings are the courses on study skills.

The aggregators
With over 200-odd colleges and universities that are members of the Open Courseware Consortia (www.ocwconsortia.com) and over 500 others offering a bewildering array of courses with a range of depth and diversity, identifying interesting courses and knowledge resources becomes a challenge especially for an average student hardpressed for time. One option is to seek out the best courses rated subject-wise by rating websites like Online Educational Databases (OEDB) at www.oedb.org

Then comes the services of courseware aggregators. Apples Itunes U is a pioneer in the game. Beginning their offering in 2004, Itunes U have nearly 170 leading universities of the world offering content free like Stanford, Oxford, Open University UK, MIT etc. The site boasts of nearly 1, 00,000 videos from across the world and true to its Apple pedigree has an amazing user-friendly interface.

Giving itunes competition is YouTube EDU (www.youtube.com/edu), a high brow offer from the video-sharing pioneer. A late entrant, YouTube EDU began operations in March 2008, but already has nearly 200 partner universities and about 30,000 videos. But the focus has been substantially on professional schools, like Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard Business School, CUNY, Carnige Mellon and Darden School of Business, to name a few.

The last major player, Academic Earth (www.academicearth.com) probably has the least number of course contents, but is the best organized. It helps you choose based on the subject, the faculty or the university. It also lets you rate the instructors, and thus learn from the top-rated instructor.

Scholar's refuge
One of the most underused and not so well known web resources is the D'Space (www.Dspace.org ), the repository for research documents like papers, dissertations and thesis. Designed and developed as open source software for storage and retrieval of scholarly works, D'Space has evolved as solid resource for academics. Each institution runs its own site with the D'Space software and uploads digital content in different format. One can easily access, past theses, papers etc. But the difficulty is unlike Google Scholar, there is no meta search engine in D'space. One has to visit individual university/ institute's D'space site, and search further. Hence unless you are aware of the proximate source of the research bit you are seeking, D'Space might send you on a wild goose chase. What it does not offer in terms of ease of use, D'space compensates by the diversity and depth of the resources available. Since it is institution driven, if your interest is oceanography studies with an Indian perspective the place to go would be the national institute of oceanography (http://drs.nio.org/drs/indexp). It is a one-stop solution for most of your information needs.

The Indian connection
India is a late entrant to the OCW bandwagon. The National Programme of Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)(http://nptel.iitm.ac.in) is the first initiative in the country. A joint venture between the seven IITs and IISc, NPTEL offers about 126 courses in about six branches of engineering and about 96 courses in video format. The production values are not as exacting as that of a leading player like MIT, and streaming is slightly poor, but the overall effect is above average. The major drawback of the site is that it offers virtually no content other than engineering. Even within engineering, traditional disciplines like civil, mechanical and electrical are adequately represented, but in cutting edge disciplines like biotechnology, content is meager.

The biggest drawback is that the courses are not free. An individual has no access to web based courses and has to pay Rs.500 for each of the video-based courses. Barring NPTEL, very few organisations in India have attempted to put there courseware on the web. In terms of OCW India has a long way to go.

In sum
By their very nature, these courses neither will let you earn a diploma nor let you interact with the teacher. They do not offer a structured programme either. Barring MIT, which has put about 85-90% of its entire course content online, very few universities have put up complete degree programmes online. The subjects and courses on offer are a function of availability and the professor's commitment to open courseware. So the web must be used as a supplement to regular degree programmes, if earning a credential is your primary objective. Moreover unlike UCB, very few universities offer updated versions of their offerings each year, since production of a 30 lecture course costs them about 20,000 USD at the least. Hence some of the content might be dated. But if acquiring knowledge is your prime concern, then log on to the web, a world of wisdom is waiting out there, and the best part is, it is free.