Getting an Education Online for Free

Getting an Education Online for Free

This article will teach you how to get a top notch education for free online. Ctrl+Click any link to open it in a new window.

1. Berkeley Webcasts

Berkeley
University records many of its lectures by mp3 and real media video.
Berkeley is known for being an outstanding school, especially in
computer science. It is ranked nationally as 20th best
by usnews.com in a 2006 study of the best colleges. You can pause the
videos and mp3s, take notes, research, and press play again at your
convenience. The Berkeley webcast is the number one resource because it
lets you be in the classroom with the students watching some amazing
teachers and accomplished professionals.

URL: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/feeds.php

Why More People Don't Know

Many people leave the official Berkeley webcasts
page because it links the courses in RSS format. Those who can't follow
the rss tags, or don't know what the heck rss is, won't get to the
downloadable videos and mp3s. For those people, I list here all the
berkeley courses.

List of Free Berkeley Courses

Amercian Cyberculture General Biology Structural Biomaterials ^ Discussion Intro to Chemistry Operating Systems Programming Structures Data Structures Machine Structures Microeconomics Digital Image Processing Solid State Devices Analogue Circuits Digital Circuits Microelectronic Circuits

Geology & US Culture Wildlife Ecology Natural Resources European Civ. History US Foreign Policy 9/11 Animal Behavior Intro to Computers Intro to Human Nutrition Existentialism Film/Literature Intro to Physics + Intro to Physics 1 Intro to Physics 2 Political Science Clinical Psychology General Astronomy

Berkeley Webcast Recommendations

I recommend downloading media player classic with the Real Alternative
plugin. Media Player Classic is a quality freeware program on
sourceforge that works on both linux and windows. Real Player is
bulkware and can be really annoying, add itself to the windows startup
and opening slowly.

Despite the first lecture almost always being
an introduction, watch it anyway. It usually gives the course website
somewhere in there where you can download the lectures and assignments.

2. MIT Open Courseware

Despite having a lot of people who have donated a whole lot of money to help MIT OpenCourseware,
I don't see it as being all that much better than the Berkeley
webcasts. The benefit of going to such top notch schools, in this case
MIT is rated rated 7th nationally by usnews.com,
is being taught by masters of the field, not being on a "University
Book Club". The only benefit given on MIT open courseware is the
lecture notes, written by some unnamed MIT student and the assignments
and exams written by the professors. Otherwise, you're just simply
sharing the same reading and homework assignments as MIT students from
the required book. It gives a lot of fluff about the syllabus,
calender, reading and assignments, but again, nothing more than telling
you to read the book and do the assignments.

There's also a
discussion group for each course, but I've rarely seen much activity in
them. To be fair, I saw some video lectures somewhere in the
architecture page but after looking through about 25 courses I can't
find it again, and its safe to say most courses don't have video
lectures.

URL: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm

3. Aquiring Books

Many of these courses require books in order to follow the course as
if you were a student of the school. I've been trying to go through the
Machine Structures
course in the Berkeley webcasts, and decided to get the books required.
Computer Organization And Design - The Hardware-Software Interface was
$2 used on amazon.com, and the other required book, Ansi C Programming
Language 2nd Ed By Brian W Kernighan And Dennis M Ritchie, I got at
used books store for 10$.

Peer to Peer Networks

Some books are out of copyright and available for download as an
ebook. Be sure and check to see the status of the copyright before you
try the peer 2 peer networks because many books may be pirated. An easy
way to do this is to search the book on Google Book Search and see if full view is enabled. I highly recommend Emule and Frostwire.

Some
books cannot be found on the peer to peer networks. The amount of books
that are associated with the MIT and Berkeley courses is still high
enough to make it worth searching for. Use the document option, and
arrange by availability for best results.

4. Barnes and Nobles University

Buy the book and take the course online. Seems pretty simple. The
course aren't archived so it's limited to what's open at the moment.
You also have to enroll ahead of time.

http://university.barnesandnoble.com/browse.asp?z=y

5. Power of Forums

Forums are very useful when you find them very specific to what
you're trying to learn. People often associate forums with terrible
spelling and lost sheep fascinated with flaming misspelled obsenities
and competing to see who got the highest IQ on their tickle.com test.
There are Math Forums and even Grammar Forums where typing "omg teh monkay roxxors" is punishable by death. To find forums just search google, for example for calculus forums.
Scrolling to the bottom of a wikipedia entry of any topic will usually
give quality external links. If you're confused, you're probably not
the first. Search for your question on Google Answers and Answers.com. If it's something complex and technical, search for the title of the chapter you're currently in to get examples. Yahoo Answers is more of a lame duck, but if you search long enough you can usually find someone who answers your question seriously. See my custom Yahoo Answers page for more sites like Yahoo Answers. Always use the search feature first!

Sparknotes has a lot of forums too and I highely recommend it. Here's a list of message boards from sparknotes.

1. English
2. History
3. Math and Science
4. Other

6. Wikipedia

Many people don't know that wikipedia has a desk reference area in which people can ask questions. Wikipedia also has a spoken articles page which has many wikipedia articles in .ogg downloadable audio format. Wikipedia also has a Wikibooks section that will teach anything from Organic Chemistry to the french language.
Like the spoken articles solution, wikibooks also offers high quality
pdf downloads if you don't like reading from your computer which you
can quickly view in Foxit Reader. Don't use the bulky adobe PDF, it's horridly slow.

Misc Educational Resources

These are great reference sites to accompany wikipedia for your research.

1. Citeseer
2. Google Scholar
3. Infomine
4. Questia
5. Berkeley Engineers

7. Learning Languages

Learning languages can be great fun because you can watch TV online in the language of your choice and legally play old consol RPGs with translations. Google Toolbar
has a multilingual spell check feature if you're not strong on your
writing. Yahoo Chat in the Yahoo Messenger program has chat categories
arranged by religion, and by language. Check out the top sites on the
internet for your language in Alexa.com's top lists. Read their news stories and chat in their forums. If there are words you don't understand use babelfish
to give a rough translation. Remember that there's people interested in
practicing English too, so they can be patient and correct you if you
do the same. I was interested particularly in french so if you're also
interested, see my Learn French online section.

8. Firefox: Quick Search Video Tutorial

Watch this video to see the power of the firefox quick search and
how to make your own custom searches. Increasing the speed at which you
can access resources can in the long term save hours of time.

Drag and Drop Quick Searches

1. Click Ctrl+B
2. Open the Quick Search Folder
3. Drag and drop these links into that folder.
4. Right click the new links and click properties
5. Add a keyword

Drag
and drop these selected links right below into your quick searches
folder in firefox, and just input a keyword as shown in the video.

• Citeseer
• MIT Video
• Youtube
• Google Video
• Archive.org
• Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Futef
• Yahoo Answers
• Google Answers
• PHP documentation

Quick Search Feature Tutorial

If you open the firefox bookmarks tab (click ctrl+B), there's a
folder called quick search. For example, I type the phrase "w mad cow
disease" and it will automatically give me the wikipedia entry for mad
cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

Step by Step to Adding a Quick Search

1. Find a site you search often
2. Do a search for any keword
3. Copy the URL address after clicking search
4. Click Ctrl+B to open the bookmarks panel
5. Open the "Quick Searches" folder.
6. Right Click and Add a new book mark
7. Paste the URL address into the locations box
8. Replace the keyword you searched with %s
9. Add a keyword (like w for wikipedia)

Thank
goodness for internet video sites, which make following those
instructions a lot easier. Here's a picture example of google finance.

Remember
you can do this with any site you use often, be it myspace, digg, or
newscientist. Quick search can save about 3 or 4 clicks per search,
which can add up to a lot of time. For example, searching "cats" on
youtube. With a quicksearch you just type "y cats" in the address bar.
Without the quick search you have to type youtube.com in the address
bar, type cats in the search, order by views. Too much effort!!! XD

Answers.com Extension

Answers.com has a great extension that lets you research a word just by alt clicking it.

9. Freeware Applications

There are tons of freeware that will help you study and become more efficient. Sourceforge and the free software foundation have tons of freeware on education. For example, a useful Mind Mapping program for those complicated essays, a quiz creator and a hyper advanced flash card maker. Maybe a simple flash card maker or a web based quiz creator? How about a macro
to automatically perform common tasks like typing urls and inputting
dates. Macros are extremely useful for the 1% of computer users that
learns to use them, but they can also be a little too complex for beginners to learn.

10. Misc Video Resources

MIT has a whole lot of video lectures, but most are related to very current events and likely won't gain people better marks on traditional tests. PBS fontline has a pretty large archive of awesome documentaries. Check out our Google Hidden Categories
post about all 38 categories on Google Video, most of which Google
doesn't list anywhere on their site. We can use the hidden queries to
search for Educational Lectures.
Google video has a bunch of college lectures in it, just do a search
for the subject you want to learn about, then try adding lecture. Also
search your favorite college like MIT. How Stuff Works has a few google videos as well. Archive.org also has its own section about educational videos.

Internet to Replace Colleges?

There are already many online universities, but I hope for something free and accessible by anyone. Most online universities are ripoffs owned by stock holding companies. They want to maxamize profits while spending the minimal on education. Sites like AIU university
have their own team of aggressive telemarketers they have the nerve to
call "counselors" which work to excite the students into thinking
they're prime candidates for the university.

With high speed
connection users increasing and streaming video downloads becoming more
and more popular, it's very likely that internet based streams and
video collections will one day compete with traditional schools. Video
competition will eventually lead to more and more efficient and fun
ways of learning things. For example many instant messenger programs
like MSN and Yahoo! have white board options that people could use
already for Math. You can even use an Ajax Whiteboard
and invite a friend using only your browser. A whiteboard in
combination with a voice messenger like skype and yahoo is an
invaluable tutor resource. A search for Education and self learning on google brings up more sites than I can bookmark.

So
maybe you won't get the little paper saying you graduated from that
University, but is that really the point of college? I anticipate and
immidiate grown of "...yes...sfld", but in any case, if you write your
notes down and show you've participated in the online courses the
classes will be a breeze and the colleges are more likely to accept you
when you show them you're hard work, and how you've been able to apply
it. Impress them with your talk about current issues from the MIT
videos, and your contributions to helping others in wikipedia help desk
after you studied the subjects.