Online education has become an option. One of the pioneering universities to sponsor free education in management is the School of Business and Economics at Umeå University. Free education has become available through several websites with some resembling online universities.[specify] Online education faces barriers such as institutional adoption, license or copyright restrictions, incompatibility and educator awareness of available resources.[6]
Due to the extensive requirements of resources for online education, many open community projects have been initiated. Specifically, the Wikimedia Foundation has developed a project devoted to free online educational resources, Wikiversity, and recently, several other sites for specific topics have developed. MyMCAT[7] was designed as a free community project to aid students wishing to take the MCAT. freeed.com[8] was launched in March 2010 as a free online knowledge and learning platform. Users and experts upload multimedia content to expand specific topics available on the website.
As free educational resource becomes available online, the Internet has become a platform of choice for students to learn. Since the early days of the Internet adoption, the United States federal government foreseen the benefits and risks of information sharing. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) enacted since October 21, 1998, to protect children from sharing uncessary personal information online. The COPPA regulation has proven to be difficult for website and online service operators to implement. Novachi's[who?] free education system is the first COPPA compliant system to properly obtain parental consent online.
World University and School[9] aggregates free, open teaching and learning content on the Internet. The World University and School is a global, digital, open, free-to-students, potentially degree-granting Wiki university and school. The website is potentially in all languages, nation-states, subjects and at all levels using a Wikipedia-with-MIT Open Course Ware model. It is for everyone, especially OLPC[expand acronym] countries and the emerging world, which anyone can edit, primarily by teaching, adding, or learning.