Anyone, anywhere can now attend MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) over the internet, from home, for free. I've known about this for awhile, but after reading an article in the Globe and Mail over the New Years holiday it occured to me that I've never blogged about it and that there may well be people out there who don't know. An MIT initiative called "OpenCourseWare" makes virtually all the school's courses available online for free — lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures.
There are currently over 1800 courses offered (under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence) trough the MIT OpenCourseWare web site including courses in architecture and planning, engineering, health sciences and technology, humanities, arts and social sciences, and more.
Other Universities around the world are also jumping on board. Again from the Globe and Mail:
More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.Here are a few more links you might find useful.
Of course the downside to all of this is you're not actually an MIT Student (or John's Hopkins, or Tufts etc.,) that costs alot of money. So, you don't get a grade, you can't raise your hand and ask a question and you don't get university credit for it. But if you want to learn, if you want to study what people are studying at some of the worlds elite universities it's all right there waiting for you.
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