I’ve done three past posts about free education…
MIT Admissions Building
And, even though I’d hesitate to recommend a writer take a “creative writing course“, many writers have need of specific knowledge for many of their stories—like, for instance, how a gunshot wound is treated; or, how a certain drink is mixed; or, why people blush—then, there are the times a writer needs a rather “full” education, like when a character’s profession is crucial to the plot…
One of the sources mentioned in those past posts was MIT OpenCourseWare (and, in case you had no reason to know, MIT stands for Massachusetts Institute of Technology; but there’s more than tech available—details on that in a moment…).
The physical school is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and MIT has a very interesting history going back to 1846…
From their site:
“MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”
“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.”
~ Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering
“Our audience is divided among students, educators, and self-learners…”
“MIT OpenCourseWare receives over 2 million visits each month. These visits come from all over the world, with over half coming from outside of North America…”
The “technology” in their name does indicate lots of studies in that area; but, there is So Much More—here are the Department headings—clicking on any of these links will open up that Department’s full list of courses, with all the pertinent information (including the exams with all the answers)—when you decide on the course you want, look at the bottom of the left column of links for “Download Course Materials“, and you’re On Your Way :-)
And, they’re All Free… And, you can take the whole course or only bits of it… And, it’s on Your schedule :-)
SPECIAL NOTE:
If you’re new to all this, what happens when you download a course is you get a ZIP file. When you open, it look for the file (near the bottom of the folder) called “START.htm”—click it and the course opens in your browser…
And, here’s an important note from the ReadMe file:
“This zip package contains the HTML pages and files associated with the course.
“Some materials – such as videos, java applets, and other special content – are not posted on the OCW server, and are therefore not part of this package. This prevents zip packages from becoming too large for download. To download these resources to your computer, please read this FAQ.”
Extremely Important Note about Textbooks:
While I certainly haven’t checked every course offered by MIT, the three I downloaded showed “required texts” for the courses—in almost all cases, there was either an inexpensive paperback edition or a cheap Kindle e-book; and, there are also many that are linked-to on-line (for no cost)…
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