Location Should Be No Barrier To A Desire To Learn

Location should be no barrier to a desire to learn

I couldn’t agree more! That quote is taken from the website of Open University’s will Open Content Initiative. I followed that and a bunch of other links from this Lifehacker post today. Check out some of the other links to free online educational content,

Courses from Covenant Theological Seminary
Podcasts from Berkley UC (I recently listened to a whole semester of lectures on Film and Existentialism – thanks!)
Archived lectures at Princeton
Free Online Courses from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Without doubt one of the advantages of digitising educational content, is that it allows institutions to give away material. Why give it away? Well because that may well serve the greater goals of education as a means to improve culture!

Consider it another way – why would a theological college ever be opposed to giving away content?

I think this is a really important question if we consider the role of such colleges in improving the theological discourse at a lay, or congregational level. If that is a priority, then it makes sense to drop the barriers to access, drop them completely.

There’s also potentially a scope here to reconsider the role of academic publishing, especially in terms of journals (I’ve touched on this before here and here). I like the “idea” of the peer-review process and I’ve learnt a great deal from reading journals. However, I’m not sure, for the purposes of theology, they are a good or efficient model anymore. Journals are hard and costly to access for those outisde the academy (sometimes so even within it!).

It’s a drum I’ve been banging for a while and will continue to bang for some time to come. All of us with a passion for theological education need to consider if the models we use are really making the most of the technology available and are optimally aligned with our goals.

[tags] Theological Education, Online Learning, Distance Education [/tags]