Free Education Online

MIT OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/) was the first large-scale attempt by a major university to make all of the materials from its previously held classes available freely on the Web to anyone who wanted to download them. They have something like 1900 courses online, mostly providing reading lists, archived discussion topics, homework and exams with solutions, lecture notes and demonstrations. A minority of the classes have complete video lectures and complete textbooks by the MIT professors.

Many other universities have followed suit since then, on a smaller scale. The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has started their own Open Courseware (OCW) project (http://ocw.jhsph.edu/) with a lot of materials related to public health courses. Utah State's OCW (http://ocw.usu.edu/courselist) offers a good mix of lower level general education classes in anthropology, biology, engineering, economics, English, farming and wildlands resources. The OCW from Tufts University (http://ocw.tufts.edu/) focuses on medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine. The University of Washington (http://www.extension.washington.edu/openuw/) has courses in a random scattering of subjects such as Greek mythology, Basic HTML and the history of jazz. University of California Berkeley (http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php) is probably the closest to matching MIT in scope at this point with a large collection of webcasts from a variety of sources. A basics economics course is available from the University of Omaha (http://ecedweb.unomaha.edu/teachsug.htm). Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, WA has a slew of mathematics courses online (http://math.whatcom.ctc.edu/content/Links.phtml?cat=3). Princeton University (http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/) has a wide range of their lectures archived online. Carnegie Mellon has an Open Courseware initiative that is getting off the ground with a lot of general education subjects (http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/), and Stanford distributes a lot of lectures and educational materials through iTunes (http://itunes.stanford.edu/).

Another alternative in free education is a wide range of free universities and independent classes that are springing up on the Web. Creative Commons operates an educational subsite (http://learn.creativecommons.org/) that offers up user-created and collaborative educational content. Wikiversity (http://www.wikiversity.org/) is a Wikipedia offshoot that focuses on building classes using the Wiki model. Amongst other things on the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php) you can find lectures, papers and educational videos. Curriki (http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome) is a rapidly growing open source collection of course curricula. Word2Word (http://www.word2word.com/) is a promising hub for the many free language learning services now available on the internet. Also along the lines of hubs for free language learning resources is VistaWide (http://www.vistawide.com/).

There are also a number of initiatives attempting to get full, usable free and open-source textbooks available online. I've previously published an article about open source textbooks that have been adopted by schools throughout the country. You can read it here. As textbook prices become too prohibitive for the budgets of students (being hurt even further now by the economic crisis and state budget slashing in response to it), many students have turned to scanning textbooks that are commonly used in classes at many colleges and sharing them via peer to peer networks and torrent sites. While technically not legal and a copyright violation, many students see the textbook industry as a predatory virtual monopoly that can dictate inflated prices and force students to buy new editions of books every year when there isn't really enough new information to merit a whole new edition at the full retail price.

If you're looking to spend money or go into debt, you can always go to traditional college, but there are plenty of ways to educate yourself online wholly for free now.