Imperial students create online learning database

Students who met at Imperial College have created a website offering free online education courses.

The Open Academy (theopenacademy.com) is a free-to-use website with over 7000 classes and covering a range of topics includingScience, Mathematics, Engineering, Law, Arts, Medicine, Social Sciences and the Humanities. Representing 20 of the world’s top universities, The Open Academy has lecture material including videos, slides, exercises and practice exams, from introductory to advanced level.

They are not the first to do this. In 2002 MIT announced that it would be “opening” its classrooms, offering its courses online for free.Since then, others have followed suit including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Columbia. The movement has now reached over 200 universities across continents. MIT and Harvard have recently joined forces to create the online resource EdX – setting aside $60million and aiming to “educate 1 billion people around the world”.

Individuals have also started to teach online for all subjects, from music to maths. Salman Khan, an MIT alumnus, quit his job at a hedge fund to teach on YouTube, eventually founding the Khan Academy.

The Open Academy was founded on similar ideals. They say that educational background defines “so much of us”. The team say they were keen to offer people the opportunity to educate themselves at their own pace. They said: “Having all the available educational resources under our hands made sense as this was the way we learned. Making a website out of it just came as a natural outcome. This was something that we wanted to exist.”

The students came up with the idea in2011, and gathered people that they thought could help them. They then worked on building the website during the summer. “By December we had the first version of the site ready with enough material to take it live, but not enough to bring it to the level that we wanted it to be”.

At present 7 people are working on the project, handling programming, legal issues and PR, as well as continuing research and development. With one of the creators of the site saying “I spend about 20 hours a week on the project”.

All of the material is arranged on the website by subject. The team hope to expand the website as much as possible, building up an extensive library of PDF notes and exercises. Open Academy hope to pursue partnerships with the universities themselves (it already offers some courses run by Oxford) and help them expand their online presence.

The hope is to for the amount of content on the website to increase, and say that they have “a bunch of ideas that we think will enhance user interactiveness and at the same time create new content”.

They say they are “really excited” about all of the future plans that they have, but don’t want to “spoil the surprise”.

The Open Academy team ended bysaying: “The Open Academy a truly diverse and unique academic centre in the Web. We realized the sheer number of things that can be done to enrich it and have never been as excited about it as we are now. “