Technophilia: Get a free college education online
by Wendy Boswell
Not headed back to school this fall? You could be, minus the exorbitant tuition and without even leaving your chair. The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you'd join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.
Note: Many colleges and universities offer free courses online in the form of podcasts, lectures, tutorials and full-blown online classes. Most of these courses, while extremely smart-making, will NOT award any college credits or degrees.
Free online college courses
Grab some larnin' from the
University of Washington's free online courses; Greek mythology, American Revolution, Heroic Fantasy are just some of the offerings. If you get tired of that, you can study
economics at the University of Nebraska.
Teach yourself
sign language from Michigan State University. Browse through the vast treasures at the
Library of Congress. View
free videos on all sorts of subjects from Annenberg Media, a major supplier to most distance learning universities, or read the
core documents of American democracy.
Feel like a little light reading? You can study theology at
Covenant Seminary; course offerings are delivered via a combo of free downloadable .pdf files and podcasts, and include subjects ranging from Church History to the Modern Reformation.
Learn mathematics with this extensive
list of free online math courses from Whatcom Community College. Visit
Carnegie Mellon University and take Biology, Causal Reasoning, Statistics, and more, all for free.
Portland State University offers a
free Swedish language course, in addition to a free
Hungarian language course. Or, you can take an Italian language and culture course from
Brooklyn College. California State also offers a free
Conversational Mandarin Chinese course, and you can learn
Turkish via the University of Arizona.
The University of Washington School of Medicine offers
free CPR classes online, complete with video and instructional guides. You can also take health courses from the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; anything from adolescent health to population science.
Prepare for the
US citizenship test from the Missouri Southern State University. Learn
linear algebra from the University of Puget Sound. Learn about
bioterrorism (really) and other hazards from the University of North Carolina.
Get free online mathematics textbooks, videos, and lecture notes from
New York University. Take advantage of
Tufts University's open courses on dentistry, medicine, nutrition, and more. Learn about cognitive science from
Hampshire College.
Take eight different courses via the
Sofia Project, a collaborative effort between select California community colleges. Brigham Young University offers
independent study in subjects such as Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study. Get access to ten free seminary courses from
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Learn about human resources in 52 (!) different free courses from
ERI. Browse a huge variety of materials in the University of Michigan's
courses and seminars on Internet laws.
Ivy League
Take advantage of
Stanford University's free CS education library. Go to college by taking free classes at
MIT. Go to
Berkeley with your
iPod.The
University of Pennsylvania has an extensive online library; over 25,000 books are listed here.
Just debuted, you can take free courses from
Yale (funded by HP) on such diverse subjects as the Old Testament or Physics. Watch or read free online lectures in archival format from
Princeton. Get a free
Introduction to Probability text from Dartmouth.
Google tricks
Using the right keywords, find
course syllabi (insert your own subject),
lectures,
tutorials,
notes,
podcasts, and various sorts of
online books using Google.
As time goes on, I'm sure we'll see even more colleges and universities making even more of their courses open access. Got any other free online college courses or resources you'd like us to know about? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Wendy Boswell is an associate editor at Lifehacker who loves to learn on the web. Her special feature Technophilia appears every Monday at Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Technophilia RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
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