MIT for Free? OpenCourseWare Lets You Study from the Best

We’ve all heard stories of how Abraham Lincoln helped himself to an education by reading by the firelight and doing arithmetic problems scratching coal on a shovel. Maybe you want to further your education, don’t care about certificates, but just don’t have the money to audit college classes. You could go to a library, sure, and there’s always the Internet. But sometimes what you really need is a bit of structure when tackling a new and difficult subject.

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Lucky you, you’ve got it easier. In 2002, MIT released materials from fifty courses the institution offered. I’m not talking about just the syllabus and the course list, my goodness no! Most of these courses have the syllabus, lecture notes, assignments with problem sets and answers, exams and solutions and in some cases video or audio downloads of lectures.

Like any project of this magnitude, it has grown. The MIT OpenCourseWare now offers nearly 2,000 of its courses on the site. Many of the courses have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Thai. OCW now averages a million visitors each month.

So who’s using this?

Right now, 49% of the site’s users - a vast majority, are self learners who want to enhance their personal knowledge, plan a future course of study or just keep up with new material their individual fields.

One such self-learner is Joe Decker, a popular photographer in California and not so closet Renaissance man. Decker has this to say about OCW, "I've been working through the Genetics more than I expected, the fact that I can work through the material at my own pace works out well for me.

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Having the homework assignments included in the class materials has also provided a useful cross-check for me that I've gotten the main points the instructors are trying to make." He also cautions, "It's 20 years since I've had any hard science education, on the other hand, I do have that background, a BS from Caltech gives me some context other folks might not have. *shrug* I just don't know."

Another 32% are students who want to compliment a course they’re taking, and about 16% are educators who want ideas developing their own courses or want to brush up on material they’re teaching. Response from users of the site has been overwhelming positive.

Now, understand that OCW is not an MIT education. You get no degree or certification, neither do you have access to help from the faculty. This is truly the candy store for the self-learner.

You’ll need the following to access OCW:

A PC, Macintosh or UNIX platform computer

An internet connection. While the high-speed connection is ideal, you should be able to view the material with any connection faster than 28.8kbps.

A supported browser. The site has been tested with the following ones:

Internet Explorer version 6.0+ (Windows)
Safari version 1.2.2+ (Mac OSX)
Firefox 1.0+ (all platforms)
Mozilla 1.7+ (all platforms)

Various software packages to view materials. MSOffice is a help, but you can download many free viewers from the Microsoft site to see MS Office material even if you don’t own the software package. Many others are wholly free.

For those of you who use RSS feeds, you can subscribe to a feed for your course to make sure you get any new material uploaded.

High school kids can sign on, and start prepping for the heavy courseload at a technical university, and older folks can just enjoy stretching their minds with wonderfully challenging material. Teachers can study and improve their own courses, and college students can supplement their coursework. For anyone who dreams of an education, and has both self-motivation and a computer, this is a fabulous resource.

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