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For more than 10 years, Carnegie Mellon has been offering an open learning solution as an effort to make courses freely available to learners all over the world and has brought in an interesting initiative by designing courses that would respond to the individual needs of each student.

The university explores how the open-learning technology solution as opposed to a normal classroom education could be used to speed up the teaching and learning process:

Unlike some OpenCourseWare programs, Open Learning Initiative courses are designed with the distance learner in mind and include all of the materials necessary and the use of a highly sophisticated tutorial system available for all: The university provides instructors with a platform to make their own versions of the courses. Anyone can learn from their syllabi, written lectures, and videos. Their  program employs cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, and simulations. Assessment and evaluation tools are also built into the courses.

The first courses developed through Open Learning initiative (OLI) are introductory courses intended to replace large lecture format courses in Economics, Statistics, Causal Reasoning, Logic. Now more than a dozen subjects are available for Engineering, Logic, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics, French, Empirical Research Methods (under development but available), Computational Mathematics, and Visual Communication Design. They are all open and available to anyone.

Visit the Open Learning Initiative website for the full set of Open & Free Courses.

The university’s OLI reinvents Higher Education: More than just making courses and  materials available to non-students, or Instead of replacing professors, their learning program tries to use them more effectively: By combining the open-learning Technology solution with two weekly 50-minute class sessions, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.The Carnegie Mellon OLI members say the program should “have a profound impact on higher education by increasing access to education, enhancing the quality of instruction and providing a model for a new generation of online courses and course materials that teach more effectively and appeal to students more powerfully than anything in existence today”

A research was made comparing a class of students using the tutorial system for statistics to a traditional statistics class: the students did equally well in both courses.the researchers found that, over a two-semester trial period, students in a traditional classroom introductory statistics course scored no better than similar students who used the open-learning program and skipped the three weekly lectures and lab period.

All Carnegie Mellon courses are available on the Open Learning Initiative website.

You can access the class content immediately by clicking on the “Look Inside” button under any subject. Anyone can study course material anonymously. However, by creating an account, you can keep track of the units you’ve completed. The site will record your progress and remind you where you left off each time you log in.