Obama's Great Course Giveaway Clues to a grand online-education plan emerge from the college and the experts that may have inspired it.

The article discusses models of online higher education for the $500 million initiative proposed by U.S. President Barack Obama as part of a community college aid package in July 2009. The initiative envisions a free library of courses available to colleges nationwide. Models cited by Education Department officials include the Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative in which courses are created by national specialists and offer web-based lessons in advance of the classroom meeting. They include feedback from students so that the professor can concentrate in the classroom meeting on difficulties students express. Other models include the OpenCourseWare project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which offers course content for 1,900 courses online.