Now this is rather cool: MIT OpenCourseWare. In their own words:
MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT.
MIT OCW’s goals are to:
- Provide free, searchable access to MIT’s course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
- Create an efficient, standards-based model that other institutions may emulate to openly share and publish their own course materials.
Basically, what MIT has done is make available the coursework material for a number of their regular classes—500 classes at last count—for free over the Internet. Read that again: Free. MIT. Courses. Granted, not for college credit or anything, but geez, what a learning opportunity!
Then again, as one of the posters on Slashdot put it:
Finally, you too can feel dumb in the privacy of your own home.
Ain’t technology grand?