Free Online Courses and Texts: Educating Yourself

Is there some subject you have always wanted to learn, but never had the time to devote to it? Are there topics you would like to know better, but cannot take the time off work, travel long distances for seminars, or devote big chunks of your budget for libraries of texts and references and class fees?

There are a lot of online class, text, and reference resources available free on the internet. Here are a few places to start looking:

Textbook Revolution--This site links to many different texts and educational resources for a wide variety of academic subjects, from math to sciences to engineering to health professions, economics, computers, and general education. Some of the resources are surprisingly good, some are only average. They update their holdings fairly regularly. Here is the official blog that updates and augments Textbook Revolution.

Open Educational Resources Wiki Repositories--This Wiki site links to several "mega-sites" full of tutorials, class materials, audio and video lectures, and many other types of educational resources. If you want to investigate these links thoroughly, set aside the better part of a day or more. This site links to some huge collections of fine links. Highly recommended.

Directory of Open Access Journals--This Directory links to 2265 free, full text journals on many topics, including Agriculture and Food Sciences, Arts and Architecture, Biology and Life Sciences, Business and Economics, Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, General Works, Health Sciences, History and Archaeology, Languages and Literatures, Law and Political Science, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Religion, Physics and Astronomy, Science General, Social Sciences, and Technology and Engineering. If you are not affiliated with a large institution, it can sometimes be hard getting access to reasonably up to date findings in a field of interst. Open Access Journals can be very helpful.

Like I say, these are only good starting points. You will quickly discover just how vast are the educational resources available free online, once you start looking.

The current system of education is obsolete, whether it knows it or not. The multi-media environment of the modern broadband internet just keeps getting better. As we get closer to "virtual reality" online environments, with haptic sensory interfaces, there will be very little in the way of course material that cannot be served over the net.
It may be that teledildonics will be the driving force financing broadband virtual reality on the net, but there is really no limit on the types of software and interfaces that can be connected. Then when nanotechnology finally provides a true "holodeck" environment, the fun and the learning will just be starting.