Where to Get the Best Free Education Online

You won’t really notice much of a difference between sitting in front of a screen watching a lecture and sitting in on a lecture in person—apart from the fact that if you do have a burning question, you can’t raise your hand to get it answered. These video sites host lectures and full courses from some of the best schools on the planet.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium

MIT began their OpenCourseWare initiative and published their first batch of courses online in 2002. In 2005, they formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which partnered with other universities to bring free education to the masses via the internet…

The Khan Academy

The Khan Academy is a bit more narrow than the others; as it isn’t an aggregator, it’s mostly the work of one man, an electronic chalkboard, and YouTube. It focuses mostly on math, from basic arithmetic to calculus, as well as a bit of science. It has a great reputation for teaching them in an understandable manner, though, so if you’re in the market for those particular subjects, the Khan Academy is a great place to start (and, of course, it’s open source too)…

Academic Earth

Previously mentioned Academic Earth aggregates lectures from 19 different universities on a variety of subjects. The idea is similar to that of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, although it’s slightly smaller and organized differently—they host all of the material on their site instead of merely linking you to other universities’ pages.

iTunes U

The last video resource is the ever-growing iTunes U (accessible through the iTunes Store at the bottom of the front page). If you’re an iPod, iPhone, or iPad user, iTunes U is fantastic because you can download these lectures right to your device and take them with you…

Text-Based Learning

If you find it easier to learn 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. In addition, if you find yourself getting lost in one of the above video or audio courses, you may find it easier to reference back to a text source…

Wikiversity

Wikiversity (and its sister site, Wikibooks) is a fantastic resource for all kinds of information. Users can contribute their own projects or research to the wiki, and it hosts a ton of textbook-like resources, organized in a tree—for example, at the top level you have categories such as Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematics, or Computer Science. Going to the Humanities portal allows you to choose from subjects like Art & Design, Law, and Language, which then breaks down further into specific courses. Courses can provide you with anything from links to a Wikibook for that subject (which is a very well-done online textbook), courses on other sites (including some of the sites mentioned above), and online textbooks from other universities. If you’re looking for text-based courses, this is the place to go.

Textbook Revolution

We’ve also mentioned Textbook Revolution before, and it deserves a little more attention. Textbook Revolution’s goal is to bring 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) and license…

Straight from Universities

It’s also worth noting that a few other universities offer online textbooks, such as Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and the Supplemental Resources section of MIT’s aforementioned OpenCourseWare (in fact, while OpenCourseWare focuses on video, they have a ton of other resources like online textbooks, lecture notes, and assignments for many of their classes—especially the aforementioned engineering classes they are known for). There doesn’t seem to be a large database of which universities offer this, so you may have to search through universities manually (or see whether your chosen video course comes with an online textbook)…

http://lifehacker.com/5615716/where-to-get-the-best-free-education-online