Quality In Life – Living Smarter…

Don’t have a trust fund full of cash sitting around to send you to the finest universities?  Don’t have 4 years of your life to throw at a degree?  Want be educated by top schools and experts in the field without the typical investment of time and money?  I’ve discovered 3 options to get you started on Free Higher Education.

(flickr credit: Peter Shanks)

1. MITOpenCourseware

Several years ago,MIT introduced Open Courseware, which was the sharing of some MIT courses so that anyone with an Internet connection could have access to lectures exams and videos.  Scanned in notes plus lectures allowed anyone to recieve an MIT education (minus the credentials and the long lineups to get into courses you want.)  I studied a little bit of queueing theory out of my own interest in the efficiency of traffic flow.  Now I wasn’t pursuing this learning seriously, so I was just “browsing” so to speak.  If someone was disciplined enough to study and do the reading and assignment they could really benefit from MITOpenCourseware

2. Personal MBA

This last year I learned about  “Personal MBA” and began pursuing this myself.  Over at http://personalmba.com/, in a nutshell the claim is; “Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you’re serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help you master business without the baggage of b-school. ”  Surveyed MBA program graduates sometimes share that the greatest benefit of the MBA came from the reading list and interacting with “some of the finest minds in business” through the reading list.  Check out their “Manifesto” here: http://personalmba.com/manifesto/  For those of you eager to cut to the chase, here is the link to the reading list.

3. AcademicEarth

And even more recently I have discovered http://academicearth.org/  There you can watch videos of lectures from the following universities;

• Berkeley
• Harvard
• MIT
• Princeton
• Stanford
• Yale

on the following subjects;  Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer,  Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship,  History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religion

I’ve always found it sobering that I will not live long enough to learn everything that I would like to learn, or read everything that I would like to read.  These options offer the same challenge in that there are many good things you could pursue and learn, so you must choose well and ignore the rest.  I love that these three options truly level the playing field in terms of learning.  You may not get a degree from these options, but you can certainly use these tools for accessible quality education.

Happy learning!

Greg