Open Educational Resources (OER), which roughly means “digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research”, has the potential to change our world as we know it, through providing premium-quality education at the cost of an internet connection.
The movement was started by MIT through their ingenious “MIT OpencourseWare”, and it was aimed at offering free education to unprivileged people in the third world countries. Nonetheless, it is a fantastic source of learning for us, privileged, in North America, if you have enough time on hands and the same amount of intellectual curiosity.
You can find a fine selection of these free courses here at “Openculture.com”.
Personally, I am a big fan of “Yale Open University” which has kicked its archrival’s ass; Harvard, in offering a variety of top-notch free online courses. I have taken a phenomenal “Introduction to Psychology” course, by "Paul Bloom" and an mesmerizing course called “Listening to Music" by "Craig Wright", both courses are HIGHLY recommended. Currently I’m in the middle of a course called “Death” by Shelly Kagan who never stops to fascinate me with his mesmerizing take on this morbid subject!
By the way, all the courses are easily downloadable through website (or directly through iTunes). You can chose between Audio or Video version and you can also download the course’s slides and transcripts. What do you need more to indluge yourself in the world's - arguably - most fascinating and empowering activity: learning?
