While we have reviewed the e-learning programs offered by colleges and universities online for a while we noticed an exciting trend in web-based learning last year. Many of the best colleges and universities in the United States and Europe began to release full audio and video lectures and other free course materials on the web.
Schools like UC Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, Oxford and hundreds others offer thousands of hours of course material through video services such as YouTube and iTunes. MIT has been a pioneer in this space with their OpenCourseWare initiative launched in 2001, which now includes information from 1,800 different courses, ranging from physics to scuba diving.
Students can not get an actual course credit as a result of these programs, but they represent a great movement towards opening some of the best academic thinking of the world in the world.
Visit our free online educational guide to learn about schools that offer course credit for online classes. We have reviewed hundreds of these learning programs and we ranked the best e-learning institutions as a service to our readers.