Best Websites to Get University Level Education For Free

Not headed back to school this fall? You could be, minus the exorbitant tuition and without even leaving your chair. The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you'd join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.

This article introduces you to the three best websites to get started.

Khan Academy



The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, microeconomics and computer science.

Coursera

Coursera is an educational for-profit company founded by professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California. Coursera was launched shortly after Udacity -- a similar venture by former Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun, and shortly before edX, a similar not-for-profit initiative by MIT and Harvard.



Coursera has created partnerships with reputed Universities including University of Stanford; Michigan; Princeton; and Pennsylvania, and provides free online courses in the fields of Computer Science; Healthcare, Medicine and Biology; Society, Networks and Information; Humanities and Social Science; Mathematics and Statistics; and Economic, Finance and Business. Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. In most humanities and social science courses, and other assignments where an objective standard may not be possible, a peer review system is used.


Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a website launched March 24, 2009, by Richard Ludlow and co-founders Chris Bruner and Liam Pisano, which offers free online video lectures from universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale in the subjects of Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Religion.