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Open CourseWare delivers free university grade knowledge
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College courses are expensive, but if you know where to look, knowledge can be found for free. You could browse the local library, and I am all for that. But sometimes you need something a bit more structured.
That’s the idea behind Open CourseWare (OCW).OCW, established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a database of lectures, presentations, notes, slides, videos and more from practically every course that has been taught at MIT over the last seven years. It includes 1,800 courses from 33 disciplines. Anyone may log on and access the course information, follow along in the notes, read the suggested readings listed in the syllabus, and even work on problem sets or take exams and check your answers against the solutions. All of this information is free for the taking.
You won’t get any college credit, receive a grade or earn an MIT diploma. It is not like taking an online class. In fact, you won't interact with any instructors at all. You are only accessing the course content. But you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are tackling the same curriculum of those admitted to one of the top universities in the world. The MIT site has had over 50 million visitors since its launch in 2002.
You won’t get any college credit, receive a grade or earn an MIT diploma... But you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have tackled the same curriculum of those admitted to one of the top universities in the world.
Just because the site is run by MIT, don’t think you will only find math and science courses listed there—though they are plentiful. Students at MIT also study courses such as writing and literature, history and art, political science and theatre. Some of the courses are just purely lecture notes and can be hard to follow. Others are enhanced by audio or video components. In any case, it takes self-discipline to make this kind of study meaningful.
Open CourseWare users can learn just for fun, study to enhance job skills or find content to supplement the subject matter of a course in which they are formally enrolled at another university. Imagine struggling with a chemistry concept, and then after a quick search through Open CourseWare, finding a free online lecture that explains that same concept in a brand new way. Brilliant!
Although the idea for OCW originated at MIT in 2000, the school is one of more than 200 universities now offering such free, high quality, college level courses in a digital format. The courses from all these universities can be found listed on the Open CourseWare Consortium web site.
Universities as far flung as Afghanistan’s Kabul Polytechnic University to Universidad de Central Venezuela have uploaded courses to the consortium site. Here in Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health offers more than 60 courses to anyone who signs on. Along with MIT, nearly two dozen other U.S. schools have Open CourseWare listings, including Arizona State University, Michigan State, Tufts, and UC Berkeley.
Lately, I have had a lot of questions about neuroscience. The center where I work at Johns Hopkins University is hosting a symposium next week, Nanoscience for Neurosceince and Neurosurgery, and frankly this is an area of science I don’t know much about. I wish I’d had time to take a full introductory course in neuroscience. Instead, I have been trolling the OCW web site and listening to a lecture here and there to gain a sense of the language used in this science. In fact, I’ve referred to the OCW site so many times since starting graduate school, I ought to make a donation.
That’s another amazing thing about Open CourseWare: this whole free knowledge affair is funded by private individual donations—that and generous grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and MIT itself. The OCW project continues to grow, and although there may be some gaps in its content, it still provides a valuable resource to self-motivated learners across the globe.
For more information: MIT's Open CourseWare YouTube Channel
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