Great Online College Resource

MIT has one of the best free open educational resources on the web. It's called MIT's OpenCourseWare and it has content on 701 MIT courses. You can access all of this information for free. There's no registration. However, you can't get a certificate or a degree from this. Also, you don't get access to the instructors.

Each class has the following information:

• Syllabus


• Calendar


• Lecture Notes - PDF for each lecture


• Labs - PDF of labs if applicable


• Tools


• Study Material - Quizes with answers and explanations


• Related Resources

Content in classes seem to vary. Some have more and some have less.

With the text book and these online resources, you should be able to learn the material as you would if you physically attended the classes. The main difference is that you don't have a professor and students to give you feedback and to provide incentives to stay on schedule. Well if you could start a discussion forum or a group blog with several people interested in learning one of these classes, you could get many of the benefits of a live class. Of course you don't get the experience of a professor. Also, you don't get lab resources that you might get at a physical college. But for free, you can get quite a lot.

Even if you could learn successfully with MIT's OpenCourseWare, you can't acquire a degree this way. Of course you need a college degree to get many jobs. But if you already have a degree and all you want is to stay competitive, couldn't something like MIT's OpenCourseWare be good enough?

Many great people of the past became famous politicians, scientists and businessmen with little formal education. Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln are two that come to mind. Also more recently, Michael Dell never finished his college degree but was still able to build an unbelievably successful company. These people were able to learn by their intellectual curiosity and by their motivation. These traits are more important than degrees. Free and low-cost educational resources are now available on the web, and you can go a long way without costly, formal degrees.

Educational Resources on the Web

This blog is intended to help people find cost-effective online learning resources. This includes everything from accredited colleges to personal study tools. The web has the capability to dramatically improve our ability to learn. In addition, this learning should be able to be done in much less expensive ways than what was possible before.

Seems like tuition rates are in a never ending spiral upward, growing faster than inflation. With the web, this should end. Perhaps for public schools (K through 12), the web's impact may not be huge. But for college and adult education, the web should help dramatically. For adults, I believe the classical teaching environment with a small instructor-led class is very cost inefficient. Pure online classes should be able to greatly reduce the costs without affecting the learning. There might be occasional offline activities for tests. But most of the class could be implemented with online class syllabus, notes, message boards, web logs, videos, etc.

In addition to the accredited education courses, I think there's opportunity for informal online education. I imagine it like a book club that would concentrate on non fiction. It could be similar to a message forum but would be time limited and follow a syllabus. Student notes could consist of web logs that would not only function as personal notes but also to help others in comprehending the material.

These are just some ideas. I see a lot of growth in all types of online education over the next several years. I hope you will find this blog as a useful resource to keep you up-to-date on all the new internet educational opportunities.