Go to MIT Without Leaving Town

MIT has always been famous for attracting some of the best and brightest. They load their students with a stellar education, then turn them loose to become some of our more interesting people.

Now the riff raff (we know who we are), can audit MIT courses for free. I heard about this a while back, and promptly forgot all about it until running across a link on del.icio.us (which, in case you haven't discovered it for yourself, is a remarkable social bookmarking site that for me, has triggered interests I never knew I had).

MIT OpenCourseWare offers an incredible array of online courses well suited to the lifelong learner. Subjects that caught my eye included:

• Anthropology
• Architecture
• Grain and Cognitive Sciences
• Comparative Media Studies
• Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Studies
• Economics
• Foreign Languages and Literatures
• History
• Linguistics and Philosophy
• Literature
• Media Arts and Sciences
• Ocean Engineering
• Political Science
• Science, Technology and Society
• Urban Studies and Planning
• Women's Studies

Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and who knows how many individual donors, (one alum, Jon Gruber, gave a cool million), MIT has published 1100 courses as a gift to the world.

So what, you might ask, does this have to do with advertising and marketing? Beats me, but I intend to find out.