Open education and electronic technology

Many large university institutions are now starting to offer free or almost free full courses such as Harvard, MIT and Berkeley teaming up to form edX. Other universities offering open education are prestigious private universities such as Stanford, Princeton, Duke, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennylvania, and Caltech, as well as notable public universities including Tsinghua, Peking, Edinburgh, University of Michigan, and University of Virginia.

Open education has been called the biggest change in the way people learn since the printing press. Despite favorable studies on effectiveness, many people may still desire to choose traditional campus education for social and cultural reasons.

Many open universities are working to have the ability to offer students standardized testing and traditional degrees and credentials.

The conventional merit-system degree is currently not as common in open education as it is in campus universities, although some open universities do already offer conventional degrees such as the Open University in the United Kingdom. Presently, many of the major open education sources offer their own form of certificate. Due to the popularity of open education, these new kind of academic certificates are gaining more respect and equal "academic value" to traditional degrees.

Out of 182 colleges surveyed in 2009 nearly half said tuition for online courses was higher than for campus-based ones.

A recent meta-analysis found that online and blended educational approaches had better outcomes than methods that used solely face-to-face interaction.