Free Learning: No More Excuses

The cost of a college education is astronomical and rising in the United States. Yet, that shouldn't prevent anyone from a self-led education, which they can do totally free, thanks to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a revolution in education, much like the Open Source software movement. Through OCW, anyone in the world can undergo a full college curriculum, including video lectures, labs, assignments, study materials, projects, and more---online and free.

Want your staff to take some courses, but don't have the training budget to send them anywhere? Want to study a new discipline on your train ride to and from work? Do you wake up in the middle of the night with sudden aspirations to be a dentist? The training content is all here and free.

About the only restriction is that you cannot use the material commercially (for instance, you can't use it as part of your own commercial training services), which makes sense. However you can adopt and distribute the material, provided you cite the source and use a Creative Commons or similar free-use license. Also, these courses are not for college credit, and no degrees are offered.

And, while there is no faculty-student interaction, all the content is available for self-learners and educators to use. Many of the courses come with free video lectures.

According to the web site, MIT OCW's goals are to:

• Provide free, searchable access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
• Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept.

Visit the site below and welcome to the world of free education...

MIT OpenCourseWare MIT OpenCourseWare

Getting to grips with Project 2007

Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 - to be formal about it - has been on the price list and RTM (Released To Manufacturing) for nearly three months now. And it's still hard to find definitive manuals or books about how to configure and use many of the new features. There have been a number of white papers and promotional documents released. These typically address technical installation (up to a point) and quite a lot on the server side architecture.
But best practices for how to use the new time sheet feature, reporting the new budget category costs, using the new resource plan feature and so on are elusive.
Most information is being spread through blogs, such as Microsoft Office 2007 Project Blog and discussion groups.
Microsoft does offer courses which are loosely described as 200-300 level. Information on these can be found at the 'EPM University'. The curricula for the two courses offered at the moment do not look as though they answer the Best Practice questions. For now the best source is still individual experience!