Come the Revolution

Archive for April, 2009

I’m about up to my ears in educational debt. The current statistic (or at least the last one I’ve heard) is that the average newly-graduated bachelor of the arts or sciences has racked up $20′000 in debt. I’ll put it lightly and say I’m above average in this regard. With educational debt looming above our heads, this generation has two very different looks on graduate school. One is ‘I’d better go now or I’ll have to start paying back that debt,” and the other is, “I’ll never be able to afford to go with all this debt.” I’m of the latter camp, but that doesn’t mean I want to learn any less than my peers who ran up the stairs in the ivory tower. I just want to do that learning for free.

That is, of course, what I’ve been doing with apprenticeships on organic farms, but that’s not the best move financially-speaking. A far better move is to find online resources where you can learn for free. I’ve put together a few lists from the far corners of the internet to get you started, or to keep you procrastinating on those finals.

Universities:
MIT Open Courseware
The Open University Learning Space
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Tufts Open Courseware
Utah Valley University Open
Gresham College Free Public Lectures
Berklee College of Music Online Courses
NYU Mathematics Lectures
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
Stanford To Go (downloadable mp4 lectures)
UCBerkeley webcast courses
Utah State University Open Courseware
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Online Learning Programs
University of Southern Queensland Open Courseware
UCIrvine Open Courseware
Whatcom Community College Online Math Center
Open Yale Courses
Notre Dame Open Courseware
University of Washington OpenUW
Princeton Archived Lectures
Intro Probability from Dartmouth

Languages:
UMich ASL Browser
ASL Pro
ASL from Dr. Bill This one actually has lessons!
Sweedish via PSU
Hungarian via PSU
Italian via Oggi E Domani
Conversational Mandarin via CSULB
Turkish via University of Arizona
One Minute Languages
Mango Languages
Before You Know It

Other Stuff:
Library of Congress American Memory
Learner.org resources for teachers and professional development
ERI Distance Learning Center
TED“Inspired talks by the world’s leading thinkers and doers”