Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education

If you’re an aspiring photographer or just want to brush up on your skills, take a look at the free online classes Jonathan Worth is conducting through England’s Coventry University.

Via Wired:

The breadth of content and openness of the class is enough to make any online education junkie salivate. The class’s RSS feeds host audio-recorded lectures, class assignments and special discussions. Worth’s Fall course attracted over 10,000 visitors to its website from 1,632 cities in 107 countries and the Winter course is available as an iPhone App. Lectures from the course have been downloaded thousands of times on iTunes…

…Worth’s two experimental classes Photography and Narrative (#PHONAR) and Picturing the Body (#PICBOD) are free, online undergraduate curricula and they’re entirely open. Both courses directly address the radical transformations in the media economy. For example, the course catalog reads: The role of photographer (mode of information) as supplier to old media (mode of distribution) no longer exists – that link has been broken. We recognise [sic] instead the need to redefine the role of the contemporary photographer as publisher.

Photography and Narrative begins this fall.

Picturing the Body begins this winter.

You can start your learnings now though, both sites offer plenty of material from past semesters.

Looking for other topics? Try MIT’s OpenCourseware, a site holding lectures, articles and other sources across multiple disciplines.