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Did you ever wonder who, exactly, is taking all those free online courses now offered by some of the nation's top universities? (And, more recently, by a lot of scrappy new players?) In these pages you'll meet some of the people worldwide who are taking advantage of open courseware, and learn what they get free. Among them: a college student who's struggling in a science course and seeks help on the side, and a onetime yak herder in Tibet who sits in on Yale University's virtual poetry courses.

Online and on campus, everybody seems to be plugging in. But are we leveraging all that technology in ways that make a difference? If it's just an add-on—if colleges are conducting business as usual, but with fancier tools—all the technology in the world won't help them educate students better or carve out sharper identities for themselves, argues Richard A. DeMillo, who leads the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. Gordon Freedman, recently of Blackboard, believes the answer lies in the cloud technologies that many consumer-oriented businesses have used successfully for years to communicate with their customers. Why, he asks, can't colleges do the same?

But there are success stories out there, and we've featured some of them.
—Carolyn Mooney, Senior Editor, Special Section