The other day, I ran onto this website that I found very interesting. Of course, it’s the name that hooks you, but, believe it or not, the name rings true.
http://www.freecollegeclasses.org/ provides a wealth of information about courses from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkley, Carnegie-Mellon University, Tufts and others that you can take for free. Yes, free. You can actually have access to almost every class offered by MIT for free.
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So, I’m sure you’re asking, “What’s the catch?” That was my initial response. I figured this was another website that was trying to hook you into filling out a form for online courses from a “matching service”, but it wasn’t.
Here’s the catch. You can take any course that MIT offers free of charge. You can also take any number of courses offered by the other universities mentioned free of charge. You will not get credit or a degree from those universities for your course completion.
… But, if you are attending another college or university, you may be able to get credit from that university. All of this information is available through links at this site.
More importantly to me, the coursework is available. I spend a lot of time educating myself. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, to me, the learning is more important than the piece of paper you get at the end. Having over 2000 courses from MIT available to me is a boon.
Now, there are several other helpful things on this site for college students and educators. If you’re doing online research, they offer 100 Wikipedia Alternatives and 67 Google Alternatives for Internet Research. There is also their list of the 100 Best Education Blogs (and no, I’m not on the list … yet).
On top of that, there is an expanding list of articles pointing potential students down the path to their chosen careers. The site is also clean, simple and easy to navigate.
If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to check out this site and explore the wealth of knowledge available to you. They’ve done all of the research for you. Now, all you have to do is enjoy.
