Don’t you just love the opportunities new technology opens? Today you’ll want to check out free downloadable courses from Ivy League schools!

Several Ivy League universities now make popular courses available online for free.  Some include complete video lectures.  Some only give notes, reading lists, syllabi, tests and a video introduction by the professor.  Some even include forum-style interaction with other students!

If you do not live near a community college or if your student has maxed out the opportunities offered there, these courses could be your life-savers.  If you just need to inject some excitement into your at home classes, these courses and public lectures will really do the trick. Naturally, the Ivy Leagues involved do not award credit for your student’s participation in the online courses, but the credibility of those courses on your student’s transcript will be high.

Here is your initial shopping list:

• Stanford University’s Stanford Engineering Everywhere
  • offers Stanford’s most popular engineering series.  Not just freshman courses.
• MIT’s Video Gateway
  • opens the way to public lectures and forums as well as a wide variety of open courseware.  Not just engineering courses, but arts and humanities, too.
• UChannel
  • provides a free subscription service to public lectures from top universities throughout the English-speaking world. Lectures and series are contributed by Princeton, University of Chicago, Oxford, you name it… (Your teen-ager can easily navigate the subscription process if you get lost.)

• Harvard University Extension School
  • free access to lectures, syllabi, etc.  Harvard offers credit for many courses online for anyone who can keep up for about $200/credit hour.  This is only slightly higher than community college prices!!!! More about this in future posts!
• Open Yale Courses
  • free access to 1st and 2nd-year undergraduate courses.

You can find an extensive listing of top universities offering open courseware at Open Courseware Consortium and at Open Educational Resources (OER Commons).