Nobody can argue that the cost of today’s school education is way over the top. Let alone pursuing the best, many people can barely afford less ambitious, albeit still decent, academic progress. Luckily, there’s another realm in this modern where we can get free education from some of the best schools on the planet. We call this other realm the Internet, and here are some of the sources of free education online. However, please note the most of these institutes won’t give you a school diploma.
Before you jump into the pool, it’s good to know that if all you need is more information about a topic, you can stop by any of your friendly neighborhood search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) or Wikipedia. All that you need to find will likely be available at your fingertips there.
Video Courses and Lectures for the Visual and Auditory Learner
The only difference between sitting in front of a screen watching a lecture in person that you will not be able to raise your hand for a question to the lecturer on the videos. If you are fine with that, here are some places that you can visit for your daily dose of videos:
- OpenCourseWare Consortium which was pioneered by MIT, offers free audio or video lectures, and under open licenses from over 22 universities in the US alone, including MIT, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and the University of Michigan, and features courses on tons of different subjects, from Business and Economics to Architecture and Physics.
- The Khan Academy is mostly the work of one Math, from basic arithmetic to calculus, as well ass bit of science. It has a great reputation for teaching these subjects in an understandable manner.
- Academic Earth collects lectures from 19 different universities on a variety of subjects. The idea is similar to that of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, although on a slightly smaller scale. Academic Earth also features some of the universities not listed in the OpenCourseWare Consortium, so it is another good alternative resource.
- iTunes U is fantastic because you can download these lectures right to your device (iPod, iPhone, or iPad) and study them later at your own convenience. Furthermore, like Academic earth, iTunes U allows for searching by a specific topic or lecture, not just full courses. It also has a huge database.
The Traditional Text Based Learning
If you find it easier to learn a subject by reading at your own pace (rather than watch a professor drone on in front of you), there are a few sites that provide more text-based learning.
- Wikiversity and Wikibooks are fantastic resources for all kinds of information. Users can contribute their own project or research to the wiki, and it hosts a ton of textbook-like resources, organized in a tree.
- Textbook Revolution has goal of bringing together as many free textbooks on the Net as they can. They’ve got a fairly good database too, which is searchable or browsable by subject (such as Biology, Economics, or Health Sciences).
With all of these resources at hand, the only thing that you need to go further in your education is your own good will to succeed. So, good luck!
