MIT for free

Didn't get into MIT? No worries. Beginning sometime this spring MIT will offer a portfolio of courses for free. Actually, they already do this with MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative. Other schools, such as Yale and Stanford also have free online courses, many of them on iTunes. Here is one site I found which lists many of the courses available for free by colleges and universities.

MIT's new interactive online learning platform is called MITx. It differs from other online offerings as it will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

The "certificate of completion" or credential will not be the same as MIT credit or degree, but will verify that the course material was mastered. There will also be a nominal fee for getting the certificate. Students at MIT may also use MITx in ways that supplement their classes.

Colleges and universities will continue to extract a huge price for their degrees, but if you are into learning, you can learn like the big boys and do it for free.