Get a World Class Education- For Free

Remember how I talked about how you could donate to charity for free, or volunteer from the comfort of your computer chair? How would you like to be able to get a world class education for free, from the comfort of your computer chair or couch? It’s possible.

While the series on online learning from Broke Professionals is what got me thinking about this, I want to be clear, I am not talking about earning a degree. That little piece of paper costs money- your’s, your parents’, the government’s, or some private foundations’. Someone is paying for a degree.

If you’re looking for better ideas about how to get that degree without paying too much of your own money, or taking out loans, or whatever, I suggest you go see My University Money or Money for College Project, as they are both excellent resources.

This is not about getting a degree. It’s about getting an education.

 

Over ten years ago, a little place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, (you may have heard of it), launched their OpenCourseWare initiative. The intent was to publish educational materials from all their classes openly online. And they’ve done it. They have shared materials from over 2000 courses.

I learned about this just this last summer when C was taking an individualized math course. Everyone in the class was at a different level and studying different things, so the teacher couldn’t really do comprehensive lectures. Instead, since C was learning Linear Algebra, part of his homework was to watch the MIT lectures for the course.

Would you believe this became household viewing?

C used the Wii and watched the lectures on our big screen TV in the living room. My cousin K was staying with us for the summer, and she would watch with him. The weekend one of her friends was staying with us (that friend being a physics type major) she was glued to the lectures.

 

As C was looking at the youtube comments for the lecture series, he saw a ton of people from Europe commenting about how amazing this was, and how there was nothing similar to it inEurope.

Stop and think about that, because I’ll bet you have the same thoughts about higher education inEuropethat I do- that it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, that European students don’t graduate buried in debt to their governments. That higher education there is affordable, which makes it seem like it should be more open.

That may or may not be the case. I don’t know. What I do know is that the MIT OCW project is a hit worldwide, that it provides a world class education to anyone who has internet access and can understand English, for free.

In the first ten years, OCW has reached over 100 million people. What is MIT’s goal for the next 10 years? They want to start rivaling McDonalds. They’re looking to reach over one billion people.

 

And lest you think, this is MIT, I’m a liberal arts kind of person, nothing they have will be geared toward me, take a look at the course selection. You can take classes in History (my major), Writing (my minor), Anthropology (C’s original major), or even from their Sloan School of Management (their MBA program).

They even have a special page for materials that are must useful for high school students.

 

We’ve all seen Good Will Hunting, how Matt Damon’s character was a natural genius who learned by cleaning the classrooms during lecture. Now, you don’t need a janitorial job to sneak in to an MIT lecture. You can watch it from home.