Free Accessible Education From MIT

MIT offers free online course materials from 35 departments in 1,800 courses. Course number, title and term lead you to a fuller description, where you can access the syllabus, readings, labs, assignments and notes. The courses are also available to download as PDFs. Some contain substantial video and audio and courses that have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian.

I haven't explored the course materials (I intend to), but I am strongly in favour of providing the information to the public via the web. The potential to change lives is great, and hopefully, people are becoming aware and using this resource to expand personal knowledge for collective improvement. We obviously need it. Happy New Year.

*As an addendum, I've just come across this link to the 10 Places to Get a Free Business Education, it seems like something worth looking into. We're so lucky, so many opportunities, so little time!

Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch is impressive. I am fortunate to have learned about Randy and his work and I'll be trying to find out more. This post isn't meant to be sad, but inspiring and hopeful. Just watch some of the video and it won't be hard to understand. A 47 year old man, with 3 little children and a loving wife, facing terminal cancer with few months to live, reflecting on his childhood career aspirations in his last lecture. It puts things into perspective.

"I've just discovered a deathbed conversion, I've bought a mac. (Laughter and applause) ."Well, I knew I'd get 9% of the audience with that..." raucous laughter.

Carnegie Mellon University
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Randy Pausch, computer science professor (human-machine interaction), delivered a final lecture, "How to Live Your Dreams" September 18, 2007. Pausch has terminal pancreatic cancer.

The Google video is here and the transcript here.
Randy's website is here.