“Philip Greenspun and his colleagues at the ArsDigita
Foundation (www.arsdigita.org) are launching a tuition-free,
university-level program in computer science. You read that right
— there’s no tuition cost for students.”
“Thirty highly motivated and talented students will get their
chance this fall, when the “ArsDigita University” opens in
Cambridge, Mass. Several faculty members from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology have already signed up as part-time
instructors.”
“For Greenspun, who also teaches part-time at MIT, the new
school is an extension of his long, passionate advocacy of an
open-source philosophy in computing — referring to the genre in
which software programming instructions, also called source code,
are openly available to anyone who wants to use or modify the
program.”
“Greenspun’s open-source advocacy extends to the program. Class
assignments and lecture notes will be posted on the Web, and the
school plans to videotape lectures and then put them online as
streaming media, viewable from a browser. Distance learners will be
able to participate right away, but that part of the program won’t
be fully up to speed for another year. ArsDigita will also make the
software that runs the program available free to other
schools.”