Our Zero Education salon on May 15 explored why digital learning wants to be free, discussing a radically deinstitutionalised, modular form of online education that has vice-chancellors of redbricks trembling. From Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to Khan Academy and P2PU, we explored the plethora of free education offerings during the event and even designed our own utopian institution in Future Human U – many thanks to everyone who took part!

Our panel was Nicola Dandridge whose Universities UK body can be found here; Andrew Bollington of the University of London whose partner courses with MOOC provider Coursera begin very soon; and Patrick McAndrew who has pioneered these various intiatives at the Open University.

Some attendees asked for a list of some of the services we touched on, so to that end, check out the following and educate yourself…

MOOCs: Coursera, edX, Udacity, Futurelearn
Open courseware: MIT, Yale, CarnegieMellon, Open Courseware Consortium, Academic Earth, LearnerWeb,
Other services mentioned: University of the People, Khan Academy, OpenLearn, Textbook Revolution, Stanford on YouTube, Wikiversity, Saylor, iTunes U, Quia, WizIQ, ConnectEDU, MyEJ, WaSP InterACT, P2PU, Github, Behance, Uexcel, CLEP, LearningCounts.

Finally, here’s a Storify of all the best Twitter conversation from the evening. Future Human will return on August 21 with Extended Lives – details will be announced soon.

All the best Twitter conversation from the Future Human: Zero Education salon on Wednesday May 15, exploring why digital learning wants to be free.

Photography by Chris Parr