Free university education for all!

I hear a lot of people complaining that they can't afford college (especially people from the US, what the heck are you guys doing so wrong over there?). That's a lie. Everybody can afford a college/university education, what you can't afford is the degree that comes with it when you finish.

Confused?

Most universities now offer the majority of their undergraduate courses online for free.

Heres an incomplete list (please e-mail me or comment if I missed anything and I'll add it in) of universities offering free education!

Berkley webcasts/podcasts - Of the ones i've tried, this is probably my favorite. Berkley is a pretty amazing school and it shows in the quality of the lecturers. Also if you want the course notes, then make sure you watch the first 'introduction' lecturers, they almost always post the subject website along with any passwords you need. So if you are really keen, you can do the assignments and get the notes that the 'real' students are getting. (If you want a final exam, just sit the practice exams they post as your final exam.)

MIT Open Courseware (OCW)- The advantage of MIT is they provide you with all the lecture notes/assignments/exams you need. They have around 1,550 courses (this figure was based off 2006 numbers, It's probably closing in on 2,000 courses now.) I haven't really spent much time using MIT OCW, but i've heard pretty mixed reports. People are finding it hard to access the web casts (some times they are non existent) and a lot of the advice given by OCW is just to read set books and do the assignments. Which is O.K. but to me university education is more than that. This and this should help you find the video lectures you are after though.

Carnegie Mellon - I don't live in the US and I haven't heard of CM before nor used it's online education program, so it's hard for me to comment. Apparently it's ranked #21 as the best national university though (Source, US News and world report). I really like the interface on their main page though, it's easy to see what's what and I had no trouble navigating to find what I wanted. It looks like they have some interesting stuff like casual reasoning and logics and proof which is the type of content I can see a lot of self learners enjoying. I am going to try something in their economics department and see how it compares to my brick and mortar university.

Utah University - Again I know very little about Utah. Their layout is nice and neat and again its easy to find what you want, their isn't a lot there at the moment. Only a few teaser courses in each department, but I am sure if they get enough user demand this will shift. It looks as if all their courses are in the form of podcasts. Although I still can't figure out how to actually get any of the podcasts, so if anybody could gimme a hint that would be great.

Open learn - Open learn looks awesome. It's basically a university for adult education and distance learning (so they know what they are doing). All their courses are free, they are what all educators should be about, educating their students. Each course is broken down into neat little pieces, it tells you what you will learn from the course, how long it will take and so on. The best bit is how user focused it is, it allows user reviews (so if a course sucks, you are going to know about). Their is also user forums for each subject so if you are having difficulties you can talk to other students (or past students) and they can help you. This is what online education should be about, good material and then students teaching students. I am definitely going to do some OL courses in the future because I love everything about this place.

Here is a list of other sites I haven't tried/know nothing about (I plan to try at least two online courses every semester, so I hope to get around to reviewing these as soon as possible): John Hopkins, University of Washington, Notre Dame and Sofia.

What all of these sites are missing (apart from OL) is the most fundamental part of university; students interacting with other students. I am sure brick and mortar facilities will argue that this can't be done online, but they are liars. If you provided students with a chat program with web cams, they could surely organize their own tutorials (possibly with students who had previously done the course as tutors). Even forums which allowed the students to ask questions would be enough to provide that interaction.

Most of the courses require you to buy books as well. This is a cost, but there is a lot of ways to get books for free (this is usually because these books are out of copyright, if the book you are after isn't out of copyright then try and older edition. Usually the core concepts are the same in each edition but they might update sections/questions in order to sell more books). If the book is out of copyright, then it's ok to go ahead and look for it on one of the many peer to peer networks (i.e limewire or emule). Just remember if the book is still protected by copyright then it's illegal to download it, so please check before searching on a P2P network. BitTorrents are another option. If it's still protected you can always try your local library or state library.

Now, what you have to ask yourself is this. Am I going to college to learn? Or am I going to college to get that piece of paper that says I have learned?

I'd argue (in fact it's something I plan to post a lot about) that soon those pieces of paper will become largely worthless and employers will start evaluating employees on what they know, rather than where they learned it.

Update #1: I realise most of these aren't full courses (i.e, with most of them they only provide broad topics rather than third year specialized taxation courses). I'd argue that courses like these will be added, but they have to get the broad stuff done first because it has the most appeal. (It's not that hard to put a tape recorder in each lecture and post these to the net. In fact most universities do this now.)

Update #2: Yale, Oxford and Stanford used to have an online education system called AllLearn.Org during the first dotcom boom. Apparently it folded and they all lost a heap of money when the bubble burst. That's a shame, because I am not sure how even if they tried really hard they could have produced a poor experience for users. (Even if everything sucked, the lecturers should have shined). It's a shame these universities view education as a business, profit and loss statements shouldn't matter. Read about what happened here.

Comments

[JAY]

READ ALL.