If you haven't yet discovered MIT's Open CourseWare project or similar free learning resources on the web, see creativecommons.org/education/

Free undergraduate and graduate level course materials (lectures, reading lists, etc.), as well as primary and secondary learning materials, are being offerred up to the world as free knowledge by a growing body o institutions and individuals.

The schools providing these materials do not offer tutorial assistance nor grant any credits / accreditations based on these courses - nor could they be expected to do so. Their primary use to date seems to be among the autodidact set or in other institutions.

I'm looking for others who are interested in making use of the MIT courses, but who (like me) find learning both easier and more productive in an interactive social forum. Specifically, I'm hoping to build a community or communities around not only a specific topic (Tribe does that already) but around a particular structured set of ideas (a specific discourse, to use the term I'm most used to). This would begin with a basic message board and/or scheduled text chat, structured around course modules. Eventually I would like to add voice chat, whiteboarding or other "telepresence" tools. I'm after a real virtual tutorial environment - either self-led by the group (or by group members taking turns) or led by a topic expert recruited for the purpose.

This obviously would not be, at least in the initial run, something that could grant any form of accreditation. Its value lies in actual learning and development of knowledge, rather than the exchange value of the initials following one's name or the school name on one's CV. Groups such as the Toronto Anarchist Free University ( www.anarchistu.org/ ) are already picking up on the necessity of self-directed education as an antidote to increasingly commercialized educational systems and the damaging limits on knowledge that can result from them. It's time, I believe, to carry the idea into practical realms, such as those covered in some of the MIT courses, as well as the theoretical / philosophical realms the Anarchist U covers.

http://OpenCourses.tribe.net