Wednesday, August 03, 2005

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.