Online College Courses

"If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?"

Last Sunday at church an old friend was staring raptly at a bulletin board. "Is there something new posted?", I asked. He pointed to a poster for independent study courses at a church university. "Have you looked at the MIT online courses?", I suggested. To my surprise he had no idea what I was talking about.

MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is one of the leading Universities in America (and in the World). When I was applying to colleges back in the 80's, I read that one-third of the freshmen admitted to MIT had a perfect 800 score on the SAT mathematics test. The college store proudly sells T-shirts that say, "Harvard is for students who couldn't get into MIT".

Given the elite status of the school and the very high cost of tuition, it is very surprising that MIT offers over 1900 courses online for free at
http://ocw.mit.edu/. You can watch entire courses on your computer, buy the text book and do the homework assignments. Some courses include lecture notes and exams. It's a great way to learn science, business, economics, art, history, philosophy, political science, etc. This will take some time however - these are complete college lectures for an hour or more, several times a week, over many months. And your brain may melt if you watch too many in a row without a break.

I bring this up because I learned today of another online education series that has become very popular on YouTube and rivals MIT online for the number of students. It's called the Khan Academy.
http://www.khanacademy.org/

Salman Khan is a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to make homemade lecture videos for his friends and relatives. "My single biggest goal," he says, "is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me." He now has 1200+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology, finance, and history. Lectures are 10 to 20 minutes long and what you see is a digital blackboard upon which Khan draws as he lectures. I recommend starting at his website to see what's available rather than surfing YouTube for them. I've listened to two of his lectures so far and found both to be entertaining and well-done.

Bottom Line

There are many opportunities to learn online. Expand your brain!