Free University Courses

by David Bradley

As the credit crunch bites harder, thoughts of actually paying for an education fade into a distant memory as people scrabble to hang on to jobs, find jobs, or postpone retirement just to make ends up. But, in times of recession, education, education, education could mean the difference between riding out the cycle of boom to boost. But, that still doesn't solve the problem of costs. So here are some free university courses (audio and video) that can be downloaded to your iPod or other media device.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere recently launched ten free computer science and engineering courses. Then there are the course from neighbouring Berkeley. Stanford has pushed out thirty of its complete courses, with geography, physics, and African-American history featuring prominently.

If you're more of a fan of leafy opportunities then you'd probably opt for the Open Yale Courses for which there are modules on Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Modern Poetry, Death, Fundamentals of Physics, Introduction to Political Philosophy and Introduction to Psychology, and more. MIT�s OpenCourseWare project is now very well known and featured on Sciencebase some time back. One of the reason it's so famous is that there are 1800 courses available, that's an awful lot of learnin'.

The Indian Institutes of Technology has also made a range of courses available, among them computer graphics, science mathematics, computer networks, and problem solving and programming.

Thanks to Open Culture for original list. For readers still in high-school education, Sciencebase offers a collection of resources on the learn science with Sciencebase page.