Free Self-Education

I’m hoping to become wiser as I get older, and I have found a couple of great sites for furthering my knowledge, and for free! One is the The Saylor Foundation,which is a non-profit started by Michael Saylor, having a ‘Free Education Initiative’ that provides 316 courses representing some of the highest US degree majors. 

The second is the Khan Academy, which was started by Salman Khan in 2006, whose goal is to provide “a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”, an impressive goal to say the least.The stats are impressive too, where according to wikipedia, the Khan academy reaches approximately 10 million students a month, and has delivered 300 million lessons. The Khan Academy website has something of the order of 4000 micro-lectures, and over 100,000 exercise problems, which can reached through a personalized learning dashboard. Most of the major branches of the sciences are covered, in addition to computer science, and subjects in healthcare, medicine, finance, economics, and even art history.

Coursera is another free education platform that works with the Top universities and is currently offering 616 courses, and which can include certificates of completion. Most of the courses are in English, but there are 48 in Chinese as well as 22 in French, 15 in Spanish, as well as other languages. There’s a lot to like, and I’ll be starting the Life Sciences and chemistry courses, as well as taking some in Teacher Professional Development and Economics and Finance.

Apple iTunes also a multitude of free lectures as talk and videos, and from many famous schools, such as Oxford, Yale, Caltech & Stanford, to name a few. The ones I am about to listen to are from Emory on the Pursuit of Happiness, which I think I am going to enjoy a great deal.