On the Web, College Classes With No Charge (or Credit)

Free course materials, including videos of lectures, are available online in many different subjects.

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Knowledge is free on the Internet at a small but growing number of colleges and universities.

About 160 schools around the world now offer course materials free online to the public. Recent additions in the United States include projects at Yale, Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley said it will offer videos of lectures on YouTube. Free videos from other schools are available at the Apple iTunes store.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became an early leader with its OpenCourseWare project, first announced in 2001. Free lecture notes, exams and other resources are published at ocw.mit.edu. Many exams and homework assignments even include the answers. The Web site also has videos of lectures and demonstrations.

Today, OpenCourseWare offers materials from 1,800 undergraduate and graduate courses. These range from physics and linear algebra to anthropology, political science -- even scuba diving.

Visitors can learn the same things M.I.T. students learn. But as the site points out, OpenCourseWare is not an M.I.T. education. Visitors receive no credit toward a degree. Some materials from a course may not be available, and the site does not provide contact with teachers.

Still, M.I.T. says the site has had 40 million visits by 31 million visitors from almost every country. 60% of the visitors are from outside the United States and Canada.

There are links to materials translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Thai. OpenCourseWare averages one million visits each month, and the translations receive half a million more.

Students and educators use the site, including students at M.I.T. But the largest number of visitors, about half, are self-learners.

Some professors have become well known around the world as a result of appearing online. Walter Lewin, a physics professor at M.I.T., is especially popular. Fans enjoy his entertaining demonstrations.

M.I.T. OpenCourseWare now includes materials for high school. The goal is to improve education in science, technology, math and engineering.

US Colleges Move to Increase Financial Aid

Action by Harvard turns up heat on other schools to use more of their endowment money to help their students.

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A recent decision by Harvard University to expand financial aid is putting pressure on other schools to do the same.

Graduation ceremonies at Harvard in JuneThe full price for one year at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is more than $45,000. Many other private colleges cost just as much. But Harvard is much wealthier than any other American university, so it has more to give.

Harvard already offers a free education to students from families that earn up to $60,000 a year. This has helped increase the numbers of lower income and minority students.

Now, the aim is to help all but the wealthiest American families pay for a Harvard education. The new policies announced last month will assist families that earn as much as one hundred eighty thousand dollars. These families will be asked to pay no more than ten percent of their income for college.

For example, a family earning $120,000 would pay about $12,000 a year. Under existing student aid policies the amount is more than $19,000.

What Harvard has done is change the way it offers financial aid. Undergraduates will not be expected to take out loans. Increases in grant aid will replace loans. Also, Harvard officials will no longer consider the value of a family's home when deciding how much aid to give.

Harvard says it expects to spend up to $22 million more a year in financial aid. This will come from its endowment. A college endowment is money given by former students and others as gifts. Schools invest the money to earn more. Harvard's endowment is valued at $35 billion.

Other universities with large endowments are also changing their financial aid policies. Examples include Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.

Yale's endowment is the second largest after Harvard, at $22.5 billion . This week, Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, announced it will use more of that money for financial aid as well as scientific research. Yale may also admit more students.

But some colleges say they simply do not have enough money to compete with the new policies that are being announced.

Critics of the rising costs of a college education say schools are making these changes in an attempt to avoid action by Congress. Some lawmakers have criticized universities for raising their prices even as their endowments grow larger and larger.

Rating College Football Teams Off the Field

U.S. schools face growing pressure to make sure athletes graduate. Second of two parts.

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Today we have the second of two reports about the education of college athletes in the United States. Millions of Americans follow college sports, mainly football and basketball. Schools with good teams are under pressure to win. But now they are also under pressure to do more to make sure their players get a complete education.

On January 7th, the two top college football teams Played in New Orleans for the national championship. Ohio State, rated number one, played number two Louisiana State.

Privacy laws limit what schools can say about academic performance. Still, we wondered how these two universities support their football players off the field as well as on.

Stan Jefferson directs player development for the football program at Ohio State University. He says all the players can receive the same academic help. This includes, in their first year of school, required meetings of what is known as the Interactive Study Table.

This is a program in which players meet with a tutor before classes to discuss their work. Stan Jefferson tells us that players also meet with counselors who make sure they are progressing toward their degrees.

L.S.U. says on its Web site that football players there also receive extra help. It says 100 tutors are available and can provide help in every subject.

We noted last week that the organization that governs college sports is paying closer attention to academic performance. Schools now receive an academic progress rate, or APR, from the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This number represents graduation rates for athletes on scholarships in each sport.

An APR of 925 equals a graduation success rate of about 60%. So how are the top schools doing? 950 was the average APR for all the male sports teams in Division One in the last report in May.

Football teams had a lower average -- 931. Louisiana State had an APR of 941. And the Ohio State football team had an APR of 928.

Teams below 925 must develop plans to improve their athletes' academic performance.

Good athletes often get a free education on a scholarship. Critics say it is only fair to these young players to invest in their minds as much as their bodies.

Note: Picture depicts Ohio State quarterback Todd Boeckman throws a pass during a game in October