I’ve noticed a number of great new online education services appearing recently, after first hearing about “flipped” classrooms at the Sydney TedX 2012 and their newly launched TED-Ed initiative (see my perspective on TEDX 2012). Flipping the homework out of the classroom enables teachers to focus on mentorship and personal interaction than manually broadcasting their course material to innefectually small audiences. Technologies such as the all-pervasive cloud, cheap video hosting and social media for both identity authentication and collaboration have come together to enable a new way to broadcast to a larger, distributed audience.

I’ve been pretty impressed with Google’s new education offering plainly called YouTube EDU which is a collection of tutorial and course videos from Primary, Secondary and University level institutions as well as a less formal “Lifelone Learning” section. It’s predominantly American content presently, so hopefully we’ll see other insitutions around the world opening their virtual doors.

The one that’s really got me interested enough to consider taking a course is Coursera from Princeton, Standford, Michigan and Pennsylvania universities. It’s an extremely slick-looking site, with detailed introductions to the courses and when they will be starting. The courses require sign-up but they’re all free. The are real modules from real degrees and I believe (at least some of them) would actually count towards a real qualification. You even get posted a certificate!

For someone like myself – in full time employment but keen to keep up with my aging degree – it’s a perfect choice to take low-commitment courses to bring yourself up to date. Once I’ve finished building my house I’m going to take the Machine Learning course and see what’s been happening in the world of Artificial Intelligence over the last 18 years since I graduated (gulp!).

My first project? I think I’ll build a robot student which searches for and consumes massively online courses – starting with Machine Learning!