No, this isn’t a junk email, it’s for real.  As part of its mission to“advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided to put all their courses online for free.  They call it Open Course Ware or OCW and the stated goals of the program are:

 MIT OCW's goals are to:

• Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
• Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept.

Here’s the MIT OCW website address if you’d like to take a course at M.I.T. during your free time this weekend:  http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

But wait, there's more...

MIT has also created a specific version of it's OpenCourseWare for high school students.  This site is definitely a worthwhile destination for any secondary education teacher to check out:

http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/

But wait, there's even more!!!

There's a whole group of other universities from all around the world that are posting lectures and course materials online also.  Check out the:  Open Courseware Consortium

And...

You can also watch plenty of college lectures for free at this website: Academic Earth

But wait, there's even more than that!!!

There are other websites where you can take college level classes for free like these: Coursera.org and OpenCulture.com.

SO WHAT'S STOPPING YOU FROM LEARNING SOMETHING NEW?

PRACTICE ACTIVITY:    Check out the sites.  The course syllabus, notes, readings, videos and activities are all posted there for free.  You could do it all on your own.  Unfortunately you’ll have to pay the university to get credit for the courses.  

TO KEEP ON LEARNING:  Looking for more information about online college courses.  Try searching the internet for:

Open Course Ware
Online courses
distance learning

Looking for Something?