Free Online Courses from World’s Top Universities

Harvard and MIT announce today that the two universities will work with the non-profit organization edX to offer free online courses. Education from two of the most sought after universities is now available for everyone around the world free of charge. Of course, this program offers a certificate but no credit.

Not long before, Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, and University of Michigan partnered with Coursera for the same purpose.

There are two implications to draw on this. The first is that I am personally happy to think that education will become more accessible worldwide. Secondly, online education could potentially become a huge market in the future, but we’ll see.

The full article in the NY Times can be found here.

A-must-have software in your life

 Ever since Evernote was launched in 2008, I quickly adopted the app and used it frantically to capture anything in my life–my favorite cookie recipe, photos of cute elephants, news articles for my research paper, and important email messages.

After I moved my web browser from Firefox to Chrome, I stopped using it because there was no Evernote for Chrome version. Even after Evernote was available in Chrome, once I have left it, I could not simply go back to Evernote anymore.

Now it had been more than six months that I switched from Chrome to Safari for my web browsing. Evernote was long forgotten. AND I purchased my iPhone 4 by then. A friend of mine used Evernote for everything–her lecture notes, portfolio, journals, reflections, etc…I asked her why and she told me about the amazing sync function of Evernote between her mac air and her iPhone.

That was enough for me to come back to my dear Evernote. I soon created and organized my notebooks and put all my syllabus, important school files, lecture slides, and lecture notes in my Evernote. I used Evernote to look at my pdf lecture slides on the go with my iPhone. I looked up my midterm dates quickly from the Evernote app on my iPhone. Evernote even helped me organize all the links, pages, images, and any quotes I wanted to use for my 15-page research paper!

Evernote has become such an integrated part of my life that I can no longer imagine living a life without it. Congratulations on its “massive fifth round of funding of between $50 to $100 million at a valuation that tops $1 billion” (TechCrunch) I think you deserve that ;D

If you want to improve your life? GO GET THIS APP RIGHT NOW.
Okay, as a responsible and critical thinking consumer, I feel like I’ve done my duty for using this amazing free app.

-Summer