For The Sake Of Pure Education,
Free Courses Online

If you’re not looking to invest real money in taking courses but don’t want to stop working on your education free courses online can keep you learning.

Not all free online college courses award degrees, but they can improve your level of knowledge in many area, and give you a great opportunity to “try out” certain subjects without any fear that you’ve lost anything if you find you don’t want to pursue them further.

Some good examples of education free courses online:

• The University of Washington offers free web-based study in mythology, the American Revolution and “heroic fantasy,” just to mention a few.
• You can get take an introductory course in economics for free from the University of Nebraska.
• The Library of Congress has documents you can study on virtually every subject you can imagine.
• Annenberg Media has videos you can learn from on an almost endless variety of topics.
• You can take courses from Carnegie Mellon University in biology and statistics.
• Penn State offers language courses for free in Swedish and Hungarian, while the University of Arizona provides free education free courses online in Turkish.

The delivery of these courses is more varied than what you’ll find with paid online courses. Rather than the usual formats involving lectures, discussion and testing, free courses my simply provide documents to you in pdf form and allow you to read and absorb them in your own style. Some schools even offer tutorials you can download and view on your iPod.

Tufts University has recently made headlines by offering many of its course materials for free. You won’t get a Tufts degree, but you can access this outstanding school’s knowledge base in areas including dentistry, nutrition and medicine. Other top schools now offering free courses include Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and MIT.

For more unusual types of learning, check out Missouri Southern State University’s course to prepare for the United States citizenship test or the University of North Carolina’s course on bioterrorism.