By Erich Vieth on January 09th, 2009
Would you like to go to college for free?
Would you like to get smart cheaply? You can now “attend: selected courses at prestigious college courses for free, while sitting at your computer. The participating universities include MIT, Yale, McGill and UC-Berkeley. This is a great opportunity if you’d like to get serious about the topics of the selected courses. The participating colleges videotaped some of their courses and made them available to the general public by posting them online.
I checked out five of these videos. I found that the audio and video are quite good and the teachers really know their stuff.
MIT is a leading sponsor of open courseware, and puts handouts for 1800 of its courses online for free, in addition to the video lectures. See http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm/.
The main goal of the program is to help educators in developing countries gain access to educational materials they would otherwise not have, but helping to educate motivated individuals in developed countries is a useful secondary benefit.
Grumpy: If you want only the audio and video courses at MIT, you can go here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm.
For the full listing at MIT, you can go here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm
[...] Erich’s post about free college got me thinking: what if college and healthcare were both free? What if America’s college-bound population — the nation’s intelligentsia — could seriously consider getting married and having children at the same young age that the rest of the population tended to reproduced? What if America’s most brightest offspring didn’t have to postpone family life until after college or, for the very brightest, until after graduate or professional school? [...]