Free online courses put
Harvard, MIT in everyone’s reach
Wish you had gone to
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Harvard? Well, it’s never too late to
start, and you might not need to worry about the cost of the course either.
For the past many years,
well-known universities have been offering free, or partlyfree courses online.
These Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are usually short, self-paced
capsules covering some topics in a subject, or even subjects you do not
normally associate with the university, such as jazz piano. Boston’s Berklee
College of Music, for instance, is launching a free 4-week course on “Guitar
Scales and Chord Progressions” from Monday.
Although The New York
Times had called 2012 “The year of the MOOC”, the number of courses is still
growing rapidly. Dhawal Shah, founder of the online course search engine and
review site Class Central, writes in his Medium blog: “In the past seven years or
so, over 800 universities have created around 10,000 of these MOOCs... In the
past four months alone, 190 universities have announced 600 such free online
courses.”
Sifting through Shah’s
list of 600 courses, Mental Floss found off-beat ones, like “Backyard
Meteorology: The Science of Weather,” from Harvard University, and “Mind of the
Universe—Robots in Society: Blessing or Curse?” from Delft University of
Technology in the Netherlands.
MOOCs can help you brush
up your professional knowledge, or introduce a subject outside your
specialisation.
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