University Challenge: Dawn of the Cyberstudent

By Harriet Swain, The Guardian

1/22/09

This week, the Open University (OU) recorded about two million downloads from its presence on iTunes U, a source of higher education podcasts and videos freely available on the web. About 87% of these downloads were from outside the UK. "I'm betting most of them have been downloaded by US students studying at American universities," says Peter Scott, director of the OU's Knowledge Media Institute. He predicts that students will soon be mixing their higher education experiences from resources all over the world, choosing to study at Harvard, say, while listening to lectures from Oxford, taking part in discussion groups at the University of Mumbai, and sitting exams somewhere entirely different.