Back 2 School

My mother often jokes that when the time comes to go into assisted living she would rather go to college.  But no one has to wait.  Many university level courses are offered for free online.  The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement was first started in the United States by MIT in 2002. OCW is built upon providing free, open digital publication of high quality educational materials.  The material is available for use and adaption under an open copyright license.  The downside is that it does not provide certification or access to faculty. These are generally self-paced and structured classes, so you can watch or listen to the entire semester worth of lectures or just one lecture.

You have 4 different types of websites: video tools, learning management systems, aggregators and individual universities.

Video tools simply provide the technology to easily allow anyone  to share classes.  YouTube and iTunesU provide video tools by allowing people to easily upload and edit course videos.  You can go directly to YouTube and search for classes.  To find classes with iTunesU, you need to download iTunes and then connect to the iTunes store and select iTunesU, to find courses.

Learning management systems provide a structure to the course and are often in real time.  These are the most similar to traditional online classes and sometimes they are associated with real massive open online courses (MOOCs).  For example with edX and Coursera, you can sign up for a real class and follow along with everyone else.  Generally, they are broken up into weeks  and provide the lecture via video, audio or text.  There are supplemental materials like textbook chapters and supplemental readings.  The instructors can create quizzes, discussions and other online modes of learning. EdX is developed by MIT and Harvard, while Coursera is by Stanford. Udacity provides a learning management system environment and is self-paced instead of real-time.  Try out one of these, if you want to see how well you would do in an online class.

Aggregators gather courses together in one place to create a search engine dedicated to classes.  Typically, they provide historically access to courses, so you can watch a class that happened in the past.  These include  Academic Earth, Open Culture and Education Portal.  It is easy to search for classes through these websites, but they do take you back to the primary source on YouTube and iTunesU.   These courses are good for individual lectures.

Lastly, you can go directly to the university.  MIT created the first one and has its own learning management system.   There are a lot of different ways to access real university level courses online, so start exploring and happy learning.