From the Ayn Rand Institute:

We at ARI are proud to announce a major new online educational initiative: The Ayn Rand Institute Campus. On January 10, 2012, we will beta launch an innovative and interactive learning environment where Internet users can study Ayn Rand’s provocative ideas in unprecedented ways, using a system of learning tools that can be found nowhere else.

ARI Campus will allow students around the world to take courses at their own pace and on their own time””for free. Students at all levels can explore the educational materials that lie at their fingertips within and around each course””from the multimedia experience of a course including audio, video, and supplementary visual and textual content to the “More to Explore” section that offers reading and viewing suggestions for students who want to deepen their knowledge on a particular topic.

Courses have interactive modules that often include quizzes and user interactions. ARI Campus will also offer a site discussion board designed to help students discuss, integrate and digest the information as fully as possible. We have endeavored to enrich the learning environment far beyond the experience of listening to a recorded lecture.

Our initial course offerings will include the following:
”¢ Ayn Rand: A Writer’s Life
Ӣ Ayn Rand: Radical Thinker
Ӣ The Ayn Rand Bookshelf
Ӣ Anthem
Ӣ We the Living
Ӣ The Fountainhead
Ӣ Moral Virtue
Ӣ Philosophy of Education
Ӣ Philosophy: Who Needs It

New courses will be added regularly””the first release post-launch will be an exciting and in-depth look at the novel Atlas Shrugged, taught by Dr. Onkar Ghate and appearing in February.

Please join us, starting January 10, and explore and try out this brand new learning environment. The full, public launch of the site is slated for September of 2012. We hope to see you soon on ARI Campus!

Some of you may recall a project we mentioned here in 2006 called “Founder’s College,” which was backed by Objectivists. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a recent article about what eventually became of the college. It is not inspiring.

Atlasphere member Timothy Sandefur has published a rousing review of Anne Heller’s new biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

The review itself often seems more about what Sandefur thinks of Rand than about what Heller wrote, so I found it hard to divine much from this review. But it does sound like the new biography will provide worthwhile reading for those of us fascinated by Rand’s writing and thinking.

Here were Sandefur’s key observations about the biography:

Anne Hellerâ??s biography doesnâ??t pull punches. She is as honest and as objective and as forthright as Randâ??s own principles would demand. She pays Rand the compliment of treating her like a serious person who deserves respect, praise, criticism and blame. She goes out of her way to explain statements by Rand that are easily misunderstood and frequently misrepresentedâ??and she rightly criticizes her regrettable traits and expressions. Her book is meticulouslyâ??indeed, very surprisinglyâ??well researched. It is a story of serious, devoted, brilliant, talented, and flawed people. It is not the dreary finger-pointing weâ??ve seen too much of in the past decadesâ??Nathaniel Branden hardly comes off as the innocent victim hereâ??but a work of serious, yet sympathetic journalism. In the end, it is deeplyâ?¦one might say romanticallyâ?¦tragic. [...]

Whatâ??s great about Hellerâ??s book isnâ??t that it reveals more facts than Barbara Brandenâ??s biographyâ??although it does; there are many interesting new detailsâ??or that it is so well written; itâ??s that Ayn Rand And The World She Made is so honest, so, in a word, objective. Rand is a real person to Anne Hellerâ??a brilliant, clever, sometimes over-the-top writer; an astonishingly original thinker with, alas, too little education in the history of philosophy; a passionate, intense, idealist who, sadly, imposed such a weird rigor on herself and others as to leave her dark and alone at the end; a woman who believedâ??and rightly soâ??in the indomitability of the mind and its capacity for greatness, but who was capable of breaking long friendships over trivialities, fudging the nature of her marriage, and watching hours of game shows and Charlieâ??s Angels. [...]

Hellerâ??s book does have its flaws. I think she tries too hard to show a Jewish or a Russian influence on Randâ??possible, but hardly a major influence, I thinkâ??and she sometimes slightly oversimplifies Randâ??s views in a way that will play into the hands of her eager detractors. For instance, Heller writes that Randâ??s philosophy is basically an elaboration on Randâ??s childhood desire to get â??what I want.â? Well, of course, itâ??s not just about doing what you feelâ??as Heller acknowledges elsewhere in the bookâ??but Rand certainly would say that â??what you wantâ? is and must be important to you, and that a world that denies you â??what you wantâ? simply because you want it is a profoundly evil one.

These are very minor quibbles with an otherwise outstanding bookâ??written just as a biography ought to be. Itâ??s the best book Iâ??ve read so far this year and I very highly recommend it.

I will see if I can line up a review soon for readers of the Atlasphere columns.