A number of well-known colleges and universities offer free online courses that could save students hundreds to thousands of dollars. While free online courses might not provide credits toward degrees, they can contribute toward lifelong learning needs that educators have said are becoming increasingly important. Colleges, universities and technical schools such as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), UC Berkeley, Yale and Columbia offer free online business courses, technology courses, humanities courses and more.
Through what's known as an OpenCourseWare Consortium, men and women who want to enroll in free online courses can study a variety of topics in different languages from colleges and universities throughout the world. Courses include podcasts, exams and instruction or lectures provided in the form of text and YouTube video. Colleges, universities and technical schools as early as late 2007 have been establishing YouTube presences, according to OpenCulture.com. It's referred to as YouTubeU.
President Barack Obama has reportedly been a proponent of free online courses. The Obama administration is now drafting a program that would help pay community colleges to establish free online courses, according to a June Inside Higher Education report. The idea is in part to make college studies more accessible, and initial preference would go toward career-oriented courses, the Inside Higher Education article noted.
Institutions that offer free online courses through offerings such as YouTube can benefit from free public exposure as well, OpenCulture.com suggests. MIT's free online course website itself receives more than 1.5 million page views a month, according to a July report in arstechnicna.com. The MIT OpenCourseWare site was recently awarded a Science Magazine Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE), according to a July MIT news announcement.
The MIT site, with course materials for more than 2,000 courses, emphasizes studies in the sciences - engineering & computer science courses and media arts & science courses among them - it includes programming in areas such as writing and humanistic studies as well. UC Berkeley's free online courses for the spring 2010 semester come in the form of podcasts and webcasts, its website shows. They include subject areas such as anthropology, psychology, demography, public health, economics and intro to environmental economics. Students also are able to participate in archived course studies. Michigan and Penn State universities and Carnegie-Mellon also are among the institutions providing free online courses.
There are also online courses that private companies provide online at no cost. It's not uncommon for companies to send their employees to conferences and workshops as a means of enhancing their knowledge and updating their skills in certain fields. Organizations with different specialties might offer professional webinars that can help small business owners as well.
A handful of American colleges and universities take the concept of free courses one step further by offering a tuition-free education to those who qualify. One of the best known, the entirely online University of the People, according to a January Bloomberg Businessweek article tends to draw students from developing nations. The institution's provost and computer science department chair are leading educators from Columbia and New York universities, according to a November 2009 news item on the University of the People website.
Additional tuition-free institutions cited on the Bloomberg Businessweek website include Cooper Union in New York, the College of the Ozarks in Missouri and Alice Lloyd College in Kentucky. Unlike free online courses that don't require application, however, tuition-free institutions require it. The institutions also have varying acceptance requirements, the Bloomberg article on the web suggests.
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