Say you’re interested in studying organic chemistry, or learning about the rise of the American novel, but you don’t have the money or the time or even the inclination to enroll at a university. Thanks to a new development in online learning you no longer have to. Open courseware really took off at MIT in 2002. The idea is to give everyone unfettered access to the content of hundreds of MIT courses. You can’t earn a degree or talk to a professor by studying them, but you won’t have to pay a dime for any of this. Indiana University professor Curtis Bonk is the author of the new book The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, about open coursework. He tells us how open courseware is transforming academia – and even exciting the Obama administration.