Today we are joined by Lindsay Murphy, Education Project Manager for the Saylor Foundation – a non-profit provider of free online college courses.
Saylor provides curated courses, meaning they are built using public domain and open access content drawn from the web and other public sources. You can read a review of an advanced philosophy class I took with Saylor here. And in today’s interview, Lindsay explains the philosophy behind Saylor’s unique educational format as well as talking about the background and future of the Saylor Foundation.
You can learn more about (and sign up for) their courses at:
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It was good to hear from a Saylor representative but, once again, she managed to undersell her product. When cued to talk about credit bearing pathways Lindsay mentioned Thomas Edison College, but she failed to introduce the option presented by that college to earn a full Associate degree using Saylor courses (which I discussed in a earlier comment) which is truly a ‘first’. Nor did she mention the SUNY pilot currently running which offers up to 4 college credits for any Saylor course–completely free–to the first 100 accepted applicants. To be fair, maybe this interview was recorded before that project was announced and there was an embargo on early disclosure.
The NASA Space Systems Engineering course was mentioned and this is creating lots of footfall on the Saylor site but, to be honest, the way the course is presented does not do them any favours. For reasons best known to themselves, they have chosen to virtually abandon their normal interface and use a YouTube playlist as the main structural support. This leaves the course page looking a little pointless (not even the weekly assessments can be accessed from there) and will make it far less likely that students will move en masse from this stand-alone course to the wider reaches of the Saylor offering.