Free, Sustainable Higher Education

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to take a college class or learn something new this year? How about taking more online classes if you’re already a student, saving you the money spent on gas to get to campus? Well, another fun blurb in this week’s edition of U.S. News & World Report is about the free, online classes offered by major universities like MIT, Yale and the University of Tokyo. The caveat of course is that you don’t get credit for taking the classes but I think it’s a pretty cool way to expand your mind and learn something new from the comfort of your home. I think it’s a pretty cool idea, although I wish you could get the credit for it!

Nonetheless, MIT offers the most free classes online with dozens of complete courses available. Just click onto the MIT Open Courseware site, pick some classes and start learning! They also launched a new sub-site aimed at high schoolers this year. It offers fun, “how-to” courses like building stereo speakers and guitars and even some AP courses for science and math students.

Yale offers full video versions of it’s most popular courses in astronomy, poetry, philosophy and psychology. They say they have plans to add up to 30 more classes in the near future. Check out their online courses by going to Open Yale.

There’s also an Open Coursework Consortium that can link you to dozens of free courses from Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins and several schools overseas.

If that’s not enough and you’re still yearning for more education, you can head to iTunes University. There you can find free audio and video lectures from Berkeley, Duke, Standford and several other schools and download them to your portable device. Now get out and learn something new!