Did you know that you can go to MIT for free? Did you know that there are endless educational resources waiting for you to consume them online?
There’s a new educational movement afoot, seeing prestigious universities and educational institutions putting their materials online almost always for free. If you are a committed self-starter, there’s no reason you can’t learn about a topic that you’ve been curious about for years without acting on. These are commonly called MOOCs, short for “massively open online courses.”
Simply put, these courses would see you attending class by way of watching videos, reading texts, and completing assignments. Depending on which one you take, you might be able to get a certificate of completion, or even legitimate college credit. The takeaway is the same: you’re not sitting idly on your hands. You’re interested in expanding your skills and knowledge.
MIT is widely credited with being among the first institutions to implement this idea. Its OpenCourseWare project sees it upload all kinds of educational resources to the Internet for anyone to consume for free. These are the same materials that MIT students use and study from. You’re effectively attending MIT!
Of course MIT is mostly for science and technology subjects. If you want to study other topics, you might examine Coursera, which certainly has those topics covered as well, but also throws in all kinds of liberal arts and humanities subjects. At the time of this writing, the site offers 963 different classes from 116 different educational partners. There’s something here for you.
These are but two of the most notable sources for these kinds of materials. A site called MOOC-List catalogs open courses from all corners of the Internet taught in all kinds of languages. Be sure to explore it as well. Here’s a course on architecture! Here’s a course on English romantic poetry!
This all boils down to the following: if you want to improve your station in life, be sure to fill your brain with lots of useful information. Even if you don’t have the economic resources to do so through a conventional university, you can certainly get online, be a diligent learner, and improve your knowledge base.
