Getting a Free College Education Online

There's always time to learn more and improve oneself. There are a growing number of free opportunities to continue one's education online through both college (.edu) sites and through a few surprising third-party sources.


~ MIT, yes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a free program called OpenCourseWare. They provide a direct look into their materials, lectures, and layouts of entire majors. For as long as this site exists, I will be exploring the classes they provide. The concept of a free college education warms my heart.

~ Tufts University offers a similar Open Course Ware program. Not as large as MIT's program, but, it's still free!



~ UC Berkeley offers both video and audio links to lectures on various courses. Again, a limited selection is offered.

~ Utah State University has the Open Course Ware format. Hopefully they will add more courses in the future.



~ Academic Earth has the same format as Hulu but is entirely composed of video lectures from reputable colleges. For once, watching videos online is not a waste of time.



~ YouTube.com/Edu came out of nowhere. Not as scholarly as Academic Earth, but it is still a great source of college-level material. Search 'Lecture' + the course of interest if you'd like to see mostly college course videos.



Sitting in on these lectures without the stresses of note-taking, assignments, or tests, I feel like I retain more information. It's genuinely fun to "take" courses that are far outside of my college major.

It is my sincere hope that more people consider learning to be a form of entertainment. The most influential and brilliant people in the world spent great amounts of time in libraries; I hope that having universal free access to collegiate libraries helps us become a more intelligent and compassionate people.