The title of this post might be a slight exaggeration, since “anything” is a very broad term, but let’s not quibble over semantics, k? I’m a big fan of self-learning. Although I graduated from college with a Bachelor’s of Science, I’ve learned much more on my own since then, and the things I’ve learned are directly useful to me in my everyday life. That’s one of the reasons I tend to point out helpful self-learning resources such as my Learning PHP : Beginner Tutorials post and my Taking The Plunge: Learning CSS post. There is a wealth of free information on the Internet that allows each of us to acquire an amazing education, and I’ll bet you didn’t know about most of it! In fact, much of it comes directly from some of the finest, most elite universities in the world.

The entire University-level free course phenomenon began with the illustrious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) back in 2002, when they began the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, which was a goal to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. They now have over 1800 courses online – free. Since then, numerous Universities have joined the initiative, now known as the Open Courseware Consortium. I’ll list those here, as well as a number of other places that may not be a part of the Consortium, but they offer free courses in a similar manner.

Don’t expect to earn a degree by taking these courses. They generally don’t count as credit towards a degree. But if you’d rather not spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a higher education, and would love to learn everything you want for free, it’s all at your fingertips. Enjoy!

First, here a list of the United States Open Courseware Consortium members. See the official site for an all-inclusive list, including universities from around the world, in countries such as Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UK, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tufts University
UMass Boston
University of California, Irvine
University of Notre Dame
Utah State University
University of California, Berkeley

Next is a list of non-OCW university-level courses you can take as well.

Stanford University’s Intro Computer Science classes, Artificial Intelligence, and Linear Systems and Optimization courses
UC Berkeley Webcasts of Fall 2008 Courses
Stanford on iTunes – Stanford to go
OpenLearn from The Open University

Finally, you may want to see an even larger list here.

The number of courses available is almost staggering in its scope. Anyone, wanting to learn almost anything, can do so with just an Internet connection. Don’t have one of those? Your public library does and it’s free too. There is literally no excuse, even in these difficult times, to not get an incredible education. Wanna learn? Just do it!

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