Get a Free Education!

Or free teaching materials! EDUCAUSE put out a 7 Things You Should Know About... Open Educational Resources article that was quite interesting. I knew about MIT making some of its lectures available for free, but I didn't know about all of the various options.

Some of the interesting ones include:

• University of the People - get a free online education
• MIT CourseWare - includes the course material for over 2,000 MIT courses that faculty at other institutions can use
• Connexions from Rice University - shared course materials
• Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative - free online courses for students as well as materials for instructors
• iTunes U - From the site: "There are over 600 universities with active iTunes U sites. About half of these institutions — including Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, and UC Berkeley — distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store."

What a great trend - the opportunity to use other people's course materials, as well as educate yourself for free! As the EDUCAUSE article noted, there is a variance in the quality of material, so be aware that not everything you find on these sites will be great. However, definitely worth a look.