The Employable Graduate

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.

Don't settle for less.

Most of my friends have jobs and are at University, a few of them are doing trade apprenticeships or TAFE. Recently I was speaking to one of my female friends who works at a local cafe, she was whining about how her pay sucked and that she wasn't learning anything relevant to what she wanted to do in life (shes studying law).

I told her to quit her job and find something more suitable like clerical work at a local law office or something similar. She looked at me like I was a mad man who had a shank and smoked crack out of a light bulb.

I told her that there was absolutely no point in working a job with bad pay and no future prospects (it's ok to earn $1 an hr if its going to lead to something you love with reasonable pay). She agreed with me and then I asked her when she was going to quit.

"I don't know, I'll probably line up another job first."
"When are you going to do that? Don't you have Uni Monday-Wednesday and then work Thursday-Friday? Most places do their interviews during the week between 9-5."
"I guess I am just to busy to find something better then. I'll just stick it out at the cafe until I can find some time to look for something better"

She is never going to leave the cafe, until maybe she finishes her degree and then she will have trouble finding work because she has no relevant experience. She gets paid a measly $10 an hour + tips (Australians don't tip much, so she might get an extra dollar or two an hour more). I did some research into the type of work she wants to be doing and the average pay is about $18 and its considered part time work so you get super and holiday hours (this adds on average an extra 20% onto your salary).

She might be taking the 'safe' option by not quitting her job and having to take out a loan to pay her bills, but in the long run she is selling herself short. Really short.


Lets do the math. She is in her second year of university out of four and works 16 hours a week. That means she is going to work another 1664 hours (16*52*2) before she graduates (Actually, its more because she has just started second year, but lets be lenient).  If she got a job at a law firm doing clerical work then she would be getting an additional $6 per hour. This is taking into account the maximum she would be getting in tips and not including the super and holiday pay from the law firm job. Thats $9984 she is missing out on by not taking a risk. Add the super and holiday pay and you get $11980.4 ($9984 + (9984 * 0.2)). Easily enough for a deposit on your first house, or an extremely nice holiday.

None of those figures include the experience she will get from working there either, she'll find it easy to get a job once she finishes up her degree and will most likely be able to land a higher starting salary because of it.

Not taking a risk might seem like the safe option, but in the long run the only thing you are doing is selling yourself short. If you aren't doing what you love, take a risk and see where you end up. If at the end of the day you can't find anything, there are plenty of local cafes around that are always hiring and if that fails I hear McDonald's is a nice place to work this time of year.

How to give a great presentation

As part of our assessment for human resource management we have had to give a presentation on different aspects (i.e benefits of offering paid maternity leave). The talks so far have been lack luster at best, with students not being able to answer questions directly relating to their topic, not speaking clearly and miss using slides.

Here are my five key tips:

Know your speech back to front - Seriously there is no excuse for not practicing a speech or talk at least 5 - 10 times. If you don't know what you are saying, you will mumble and constantly look at your cue cards. If you are looking at your cards, you can't look at people in the eye and they will soon lose interest. It's also next to impossible to project your voice when your head is facing towards your hands.

Know your topic better than your speech - Don't just spend all your time learning your speech, you need to understand what you are talking about. Otherwise it will show. If you are giving a speech on web 2.0 then emerge yourself in everything web 2.0. Then when it comes time to construct your speech you will be able to give some true insight. Also you are less likely to 'lose your way' when you actually know what you are talking about. No more mumbling looking through your scrappy notes for where you are up to.

Give everybody a copy of the presentation after the speech - If you give it to them before hand, they won't listen to you and they will just read the hand out. If you don't give them a copy of it at all, they will spend the whole time scribbling down notes and not listening to you.

Keep your slides short/use pictures - Slides/powerpoints are supposed to give the audience an alternate way to see your message. For example if you are talking about the devastating effects of oil spills, use a photo on your slide. Please please please don't put huge amounts of text on your slides, the audience will read them rather than listening to you. Keep it to a maximum of three points per slide.

Keep it short and allow for lots of question time - You need to keep your presentation short so you don't overload your audience with information. If it goes to long you run the risk of them not retaining any of your content at all. Also you need to allow for plenty of Q&A time, the best rule of thumb is 1/4th of alloted presentation time should be kept for Q&A.


Bonus: Read more about great presenting skills here (Guy Kawasaki) and this (Seth Godin) if you want to be a great audience member.

What not to do in a job interview.

Recently I've been going to lots of job interviews (from the interviewer and interviewee side of things). I keep on seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again. Heres a list of things not to do:

• If it's a group interview, don't ask lots of pointless questions. - I understand that you need to get your 'voice' across in a group interview, but asking lots of pointless questions isn't the way to do it. The best way is to listen to what everybody else is saying and then ask a question which is both intelligent and relevant. Make sure you doing all your 'networking' with your future employer during the interview, not afterwards. (I.e, don't go up to the person after the interview and start asking questions.)

• When you are waiting for your interview, don't pretend to talk on your phone. - I don't know if this is some new phenomena or what. When i've been waiting for my interview to start on two occasions people have been talking on their phones and then the phones have clearly rung. WHY WOULD YOU PRETEND TO BE TALKING TO SOMEBODY? (This is happening heaps on public transport as well. Somebody needs to make a website about it.) In fact, don't bring your phone to a job interview (if you bring it, just turn it off during the whole process. Please.) If it rings during your interview, you're not getting the job.

• If you have something in common with the interviewer, don't overplay it. - Often people find out they have something in common with the interviewer (i.e, they went to the same school or they know a family friend). Bring it up once. ONCE. Don't keep going on and on about it. Somebody who goes to my university applied for a job with us recently and he continually talked about how cool it was we went to the same university, over and over again. Needless to say, this guy is still looking for work.

• You can't overdress - A lot of people under dress for job interviews because they don't want to look stupid. You can never dress up to much for a job interview (this isn't entirely true, don't wear a three piece tux to a gardening job). My general rule of thumb is to dress one level above the job you are going for. There are four main types of jobs. T-shirt and jeans/slacks, shirt and pants, shirt with tie and pants and shirt with tie, coat and pants. So if you are going for a t-shirt job wear a shirt and pants, if you are going for a shirt and pants job put on a tie. If worst comes and to worst and they call you on it "What's with the pants and tie? We wear casual dress here!" Just say you came from somewhere else (I.e, your current job, funeral or wedding.)

• Don't over orchestrate your answers - I know a lot of people will disagree with us, but don't over plan answers to common questions. For example "What do you want to be doing in five years time?" It's a good idea to have a rough idea of how you will answer these type of questions, but you can spot somebody who has written down an answer a mile way. This backfires on you in two ways. The first being that it makes you look like you've done heaps of job interviews before. Nobody wants to hire the dud nobody else is hiring. The second part of the reason interviewers ask these questions is to see how employees react on their feet. If it looks like you pre-planned your answers then we have to ask even more odd questions to see you react on your feet. One time somebody had pre-planned all the questions I asked (well 90% of them) in the end I asked him what type of food would he be and he freaked out and said a pear then proceed to list all the good things about pears.

• Relax - It's a job interview. Not judgment day. Most of the time the first interview is set up so your prospective employee can ensure you aren't a freak. If you are relaxed, it'll show and you are more likely to get a call back.