Studying without going to school

If you do not have the time or energy to go to a brick-and-mortar or adobe-and-cement school thrice a week and to sit in a physical classroom with flesh-and-blood classmates and teachers, or if you simply do not have or do not want to spend money for tuition, there is a huge amount of free teaching and learning going on online.

For example, try Coursera (www.coursera.org), which offers courses that may take, if you watch the lectures conscientiously, as long as 15 weeks (an entire term in a conventional school). Examples of Coursera courses are: The Modern World, Introduction to Philosophy, The Language of Hollywood, Aboriginal Worldviews and Education, and Women and the Civil Rights Movement.

There is also Open Culture (www.openculture.com), which features “575 free online courses from top universities” in all kinds of fields.

For example, Open Culture has literature courses on Shakespeare (Oxford), Cervantes (Yale), Japanese Literature (Berkeley), World Literature (Harvard), and Virgil (Stanford), and Computer Science courses on Android Development (Berkeley), Robotics (Stanford), Building Mobile Applications (Harvard), and Discrete Stochastic Processes (MIT).

There is also Academic Earth (academicearth.org), which offers lectures from Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and Dartmouth. Among the lectures offered by Academic Earth are Price-to-Earnings Ratio, Income Statement, and Price and Market Capitalization.

There is also Alison (www.alison.com), which features modules such as Google Android Development, Nursing Studies, Introduction to the Human Nervous System, Basics of Electrical Technology, Basic German Language Skills, and English Vocabulary and Pronunciation.

If you do not want to shift universities but want to stick to only one world-ranked university, you could try the free open courses from Harvard, Yale, MIT, or Stanford. (Many of these courses are cross-listed in the sites cited earlier.)

Harvard, for example, offers The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in Classical Greek Civilization, Intensive Introduction to Computer Science, Shakespeare, China, World War II, and Abstract Algebra.

Yale offers courses such as Death, European Civilization, Game Theory, Roman Architecture, Capitalism, and Political Philosophy.

MIT offers courses such as Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Principles of Chemical Science, Differential Equations, Multivariable Calculus, Classical Mechanics, Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, Electricity and Magnetism, and Principles of Microeconomics.

Stanford offers courses such as Cryptography, Mathematical Thinking, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Human-Computer Interaction, Organizational Analysis, Writing in the Sciences, Algorithms, Creativity, and Advanced Entrepreneurship.

There is Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), featuring over 3,000 lectures on just about everything you can possibly want to learn. Khan Academy classifies its lectures into Math, Science, Computer Science, Finance and Economics, and Humanities.

Examples of lectures on science are Blood Pressure, Fetal Circulation, Hypertension, Arterial Stiffness, Heart Muscle Contraction, Heart Depolarization, and Endocrinology.

If you want non-academic lectures that are often as interesting as (if not more interesting than) the school-based courses, you could listen to the very short lectures by outstanding achievers in TED (ted.com).

My favorite TED lecture is “Mosquitos, Malaria, and Education” by Bill Gates, in which he shows that senior professors with advanced degrees are not any better in the classroom than junior teachers with undergraduate degrees.

Each of these free sites is followed by literally millions of students. Most of them pay absolutely nothing. Some of them (you might want to be one of these), however, pay fees so they can take an exam and get a certificate or even actual academic credit.

Should you or should you not pay for an online course?

It depends on what you want. If you want knowledge but not a degree or a certificate, you should just watch or download the lectures. You would then be learning for learning’s sake.

If, on the other hand, you need a degree in order to get a job or a promotion, you would need to pay for the exam and certificate.

Some online courses, in fact, like those offered by Oxford and other famous universities, are worth a lot more than degrees taken in other schools.

Here, for example, is the description of an Oxford course: “Online and distance learning at Oxford University offers a new way of combining innovative learning and teaching techniques with interaction with your tutor and fellow students from around the world. By enrolling on one of our online courses you will enjoy the convenience of studying from anywhere and at any time over the Internet. A few courses result in Oxford qualifications at the undergraduate, advanced diploma and postgraduate levels.”

Here is the description of courses at Harvard: “The Division of Continuing Education and the Harvard Extension School offers many courses for credit over the Internet. The Internet is used to deliver course lectures with video, audio, and multimedia. Live lectures are recorded and made available on demand through streaming video technology. Students use additional technologies to work on exams and homework assignments and to communicate with the instructor and other students in the class.”

Top-level online courses, like real classroom courses, require real-time interaction with students. Unlike in your usual classroom, however, your teacher may be a Nobel laureate.

In our country, the University of the Philippines has an Open University, where online classes are held. The Department of Education similarly has an Open High School. Online education is the future, and it is here.