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10 Ways to Get a Free Education from the Comfort of Your Keyboard

10 Ways to Get a Free Education from the Comfort of Your Keyboard
10 Ways to Get a Free Education from the Comfort of Your Keyboard

                                                                                  (Thinkstock)

You can give your kids a college-level education right now — without having to take out a second mortgage to pay for tuition. The Internet is home to a cornucopia of online lectures and classes available to people of all ages, as well as hundreds of MOOCs (massive open online courses) taught by some of the nation’s top academics. Nearly all are free, and some even allow you to collect college credits. Here are 10 of the best educational online services and how to get the most from them:

 

1. Khan Academy
Inspired by founder Salman Khan’s desire to teach his cousins more easily, Khan Academy provides courses on core topics in a number of different languages. Since Khan created the site in 2006, the academy has grown from a modest nonprofit to a premiere educational resource, earning praise and endowments from the likes of Bill Gates, Google, and the Carlos Slim Foundation.

Khan Academy screenshot
Khan Academy screenshot

Simply log in via your Facebook or Google account and pick a subject; your choices include math, science, economics and finance, arts and humanities, computing, and test prep. From there you read course-based material, watch videos, listen to lectures, or run through practice problems. As you study, your personal learning “dashboard” will remember the material you’ve reviewed and suggest what to study next. The intuitively designed site is great for students of any age, from kindergarden to high school and beyond. It also awards learning “badges” to encourage you to keep coming back — kind of like Foursquare, only you’re actually accomplishing something.

 

2. YouTube EDU
We’re all guilty of slipping down a YouTube wormhole from time to time, emerging hours later feeling a little less smart than before. Visiting YouTube’s educational channel, however, might disrupt your mindless video binges by actually teaching you something.

YouTube EDU screenshot
YouTube EDU screenshot

YouTube’s video discovery system generates the page automatically by filtering the most-watched education videos uploaded to the site. While that might not guarantee the highest-quality footage, it makes for an interesting mix. You can avoid running into anything age-inappropriate by filtering the channels, which are separated into Primary & Secondary Education, University, and Lifelong Learning. In the first two, for example, you can specify a topic of interest, like “math” or “law.” YouTube EDU must be doing something right; the page has more than 10 million subscribers.

 

3. TED Talks
Since this annual conference began showing videos of its presentations in 2006, it has captivated the Internet. The 1,700 videos on the TED site have racked up more than a billion views in total. Though the fabled 18-minute lectures have earned their fair share of criticism from the intellectual community, they remain a reliable source of thought-provoking, star-studded entertainment, featuring notable names like Jane Goodall, Bill Gates, John Legend, and Yahoo Tech’s very own David Pogue.

TED Talks screenshot
TED Talks screenshot

Of course, watching an 18-minute video won’t make you an expert on any topic (just ask Malcolm Gladwell), but at the very least you’ll pick up some clever talking points for your next cocktail party.

 

4. iTunes U
An oft-overlooked area of the App Store, iTunes U is a goldmine of educational content from some of the world’s most esteemed universities. You’ll find lectures about science and cooking from academics at Harvard, lessons in medieval history from the University of Cambridge, instruction on how to code your first iOS app from Stanford, and much more. Beyond college courses, you can find fascinating course material from institutions like the California Academy of Sciences or National Geographic. There are also a good number of K-12 academies that post their course content online as well.

iTunes U screenshot
iTunes U screenshot

My favorite feature is the app’s main rotator, which organizes talks by topics that are classically important or newsworthy (like, for example, America’s Civil Rights movement). And since these are free and fit into Apple’s tight ecosystem, you’ll be able to listen to them from any i-device once you’ve downloaded them to your iCloud account.

 

5. Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium’s database offers access to 25,516 courses from 80 different organizations. It’s an enormous volume of free academic content, but the site is not designed for the casual student.

Open Education Consortium screenshot
Open Education Consortium screenshot

For instance, searching for a course on art history brings up a scattered set of results, ranging from a class on “Art and War” at the University of Nottingham to the seemingly unrelated “Rhetoric of Science” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In other words, unless you have a pretty good idea of what college course you’re looking for — or you don’t mind spending hours scrolling through lectures at your leisure — you’ll do better to start somewhere like iTunes U or Khan Academy before graduating to the OEC.

 

6. MOOC
If you’re looking for actual recognition that you’ve learned something, the Massive Open Online Courses website is destination No. 1. After creating an account, you’ll be presented with the courses that will be starting within the next 30 days, along with their descriptions. Embedded alongside are a checklist of important things a person who’d like to earn college credit might want to know. For instance, in the listing for UC San Diego’s very meta “Learning How to Learn” course, you’re given the name of the professor, the duration of the course, the average number of hours per week it’ll require, whether you can take the final exam for free, whether you can receive a “free or paid” certificate, and what prior background you might need for the course.

MOOCs screenshot
MOOCs screenshot

The main downside? You’ll still have to personally contact the university to confirm what kind of credit you’ll get (and whether you’ll have to pay for it). But at the very least, MOOC provides you with an up-to-date starting point and all the information you’ll need prior to taking a course. Even better: Listings include classes from a handful of Ivy League institutions. In other words, you could attend classes at Harvard without ever setting foot in Harvard Square.

 

7. Textbook Revolution
Unless you’re a prodigy, you probably won’t retain much by simply reading a 300-page textbook. But they’re still helpful to have on hand when you’re reviewing difficult course material.

Textbook Revolution screenshot
Textbook Revolution screenshot

Textbook Revolution is a student-run database that archives free course materials and textbooks, so scholars already neck-deep in school loans can avoid dropping $300 on a book they’ll use for three weeks and then lug around for the rest of their lives. In some cases, you might find PDFs or ebooks that were assigned by professors, free and just a few clicks away.

 

8. Academic Earth
Academic Earth is dedicated to plucking the most interesting lectures from the most prestigious schools and then mashing them together in categories and playlists. Some of the materials come in the form of a link to an iTunes U page, others as YouTube videos. For the most part, these are courses from big-name schools, including UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Yale, to name a few.

Academic Earth screenshot
Academic Earth screenshot

Though you can search by subject or school, Academic Earth’s best attribute is its thoughtful Playlist section. There you can listen to collections curated by the site, like “First Day of Freshman Year,” which goes through introductory lectures from a few ivy-covered institutions, or “The Nature of Evil,” a list of lectures that explore our concepts of morality. AE also offers something it calls “video electives” — clever two- to three-minute shorts covering widely taught topics. So if you can’t bear to read Ayn Rand’s unbearably long Atlas Shrugged, you can just watch the site’s TL;DR version.

 

9. Duolingo
It’s always easier to learn a language by speaking it to other people. But the Internet has some pretty great (and free!) alternatives for anyone who can’t find a conversation partner. Take Duolingo, a browser-based program that leads you through grammar, comprehension, and reading exercises for 14 languages with the help of an adorable owl named Duo.

Duolingo screenshot
Duolingo screenshot

You can choose to start out as a completely fresh beginner or take a test that places you at a certain skill level. From there, you’re encouraged to complete exercises based on the skills you need the most work on, and you’re rewarded with themed badges and virtual money as you go. In that way it’s kind of similar to the Kim Kardashian app, except that you’ll soon be able to converse with others from a different nation in their native tongue (and not just L.A.’s affectless D-listers).

 

10. Spreeder
Ultimately, successfully completing an online course means spending a lot of time reading through course materials. Spreeder, a website that helps people improve their reading skills, is a clutch tool to have on hand while you’re powering through your material. (My colleague Rob Walker covered it earlier this year.)

Spreeder screenshot
Spreeder screenshot

You can either choose to copy/paste the text you’d like to read into a box on the site’s home page, or install a plugin that automatically guides you through the text you’re reading (available for Firefox and Opera). It translates your text into an automatically generated video, which presents each word individually at an increased pace. Spreeder is perfect for getting through intimidatingly long passages in a (hopefully free) textbook.