A course's reading list is the skeleton of a semester's body of thought, the inventory that a professor writes up for the departmental Web site and the schedule of courses that lists the goods. Despite the obvious utility of fixed reading lists, one should jettison them when possible. The author has been conducting an informal experiment using a…

Colleges are not the only enterprises interested in the possibilities of free, online courses. Publishers have begun to investigate whether so-called MOOC's, or massive open online courses, can help them reach new readers and sell more books. For the moment, providers of the classes encourage professors not to require students to buy texts, in…

Massive open online courses (MOOC's) are the latest development in online education. Over the past decade, millions of students have taken free online versions of existing courses at well-known universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but such courses often offered little more than reading lists and lecture notes. MOOC's are…