Ever wanted to take a course to learn something that may enhance your ability to get a really really good jobs? But you didn’t have the time or the money to go to school. Ever dream of going to an ivy league school…hmm I don’t know like MIT but didn’t have the marks, money or even knew what the application process was.
Well thanks to the open source era you can now get online courses for free from a miriad of great universities including MIT.
How you may ask? Well MIT developed an OpenCourseWare site. You have access 1800 courses ranging from Engineering to health sciences, they even have cources for Humanities and the arts.
Take a look at thisYou know what the best part of this is…they aren’t the only ones who are doing this. There are a whole bunch of them and they are part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Their MOTO is “Universities working together to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.” How do they make money to subsidize this great initiative…by donations and corporate sponsorship. I encourage all of you to take a look at this amazing resource. Whats the catch…no catch execept that these courses you take cannot go toward a degree, certificate and does not count for any credits. But on the upside it isn’t all reading, the courses have audio and video content as well. There are many educational instituations from around the world that are a part of this program. In the United States alone there are 12 prestigious instituations that are engaged in this very web 2.0 wikinomics program.

The full list of American institutions are as follows:

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michigan State University
Tufts University
University of California, Irvine
University of Massachusetts Boston
University of Michigan School of Information
University of Notre Dame
Utah State University
Utah Valley State College
Wheelock College
University of California, Berkeley

Now you can tell your friends that you went to MIT (wink wink nudge nudge) and at the same time you would of learned some amazing things to help improve your abilities at your current job or and getting into that really amazing job you’ve always dreamed.

Check these links out: http://ocw.mit.edu/ and http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 2:45 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.