Daily DIY

by Wendy Boswell

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.

Note: Many colleges and universities offer free courses online in the form of podcasts, lectures, tutorials and full-blown online classes. Most of these courses, while extremely smart-making, will NOT award any college credits or degrees.

Free online college courses

Grab some larnin’ from the University of Washington’s free online courses; Greek mythology, American Revolution, Heroic Fantasy are just some of the offerings. If you get tired of that, you can study economics at the University of Nebraska.

Teach yourself sign language from Michigan State University. Browse through the vast treasures at the Library of Congress. View free videos on all sorts of subjects from Annenberg Media, a major supplier to most distance learning universities, or read the core documents of American democracy.

Feel like a little light reading? You can study theology at Covenant Seminary; course offerings are delivered via a combo of free downloadable .pdf files and podcasts, and include subjects ranging from Church History to the Modern Reformation.

Learn mathematics with this extensive list of free online math courses from Whatcom Community College. Visit Carnegie Mellon University and take Biology, Causal Reasoning, Statistics, and more, all for free.

Portland State University offers a free Swedish language course, in addition to a free Hungarian language course. Or, you can take an Italian language and culture course from Brooklyn College. California State also offers a free Conversational Mandarin Chinese course, and you can learn Turkish via the University of Arizona.

The University of Washington School of Medicine offers free CPR classes online, complete with video and instructional guides. You can also take health courses from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; anything from adolescent health to population science.

Prepare for the US citizenship test from the Missouri Southern State University. Learn linear algebra from the University of Puget Sound. Learn about bioterrorism (really) and other hazards from the University of North Carolina.

Get free online mathematics textbooks, videos, and lecture notes from New York University. Take advantage of Tufts University’s open courses on dentistry, medicine, nutrition, and more. Learn about cognitive science from Hampshire College.

Take eight different courses via the Sofia Project, a collaborative effort between select California community colleges. Brigham Young University offers independent study in subjects such as Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study. Get access to ten free seminary courses from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Learn about human resources in 52 (!) different free courses from ERI. Browse a huge variety of materials in the University of Michigan’s courses and seminars on Internet laws.

Ivy League

Take advantage of Stanford University’s free CS education library. Go to college by taking free classes at MIT. Go to Berkeley with your iPod.The University of Pennsylvania has an extensive online library; over 25,000 books are listed here.

Just debuted, you can take free courses from Yale (funded by HP) on such diverse subjects as the Old Testament or Physics. Watch or read free online lectures in archival format from Princeton. Get a free Introduction to Probability text from Dartmouth.

Google tricks

Using the right keywords, find course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts, and various sorts of online books using Google.

As time goes on, I’m sure we’ll see even more colleges and universities making even more of their courses open access. Got any other free online college courses or resources you’d like us to know about? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Wendy Boswell is an associate editor at Lifehacker who loves to learn on the web. Her special feature Technophilia appears every Monday at Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Technophilia RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

The always instructive Sound Money Tips has a great article on how to find affordable tutoring for your kids, if they need it.

You don’t always have to go the paid route; there’s plenty of ways you can tap the combined knowledge of your family, friends,or community at large to get free or reduced price tutoring. Here’s one of my favorite tips from the article:

Got a professional in your circle? Without my uncle Harry, an accountant, I never would have made it through 11th grade math. Ask around; most are happy to help, and you could foster a relationship that goes way beyond the brackets.

How about you - what are your best tips to find an affordable tutor for your child? Let us know in the comments. — Wendy Boswell

Reader Paul writes in:

My homepage is set at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage, which means every time I open my browser I have a random “Hey, I didn’t know that!” moment even if I only intended to check my email or something. It’s pretty fun.

While I think I knew about MediaWiki’s Randompage, I hadn’t tried it out on Wikipedia until today. First try I got Apple Bottoms. Oh yeah, this is a keeper. Thanks, Paul! — Gina Trapani

Very similar to previously-posted Zap Reader, the Spreeder webapp trains you to increase your reading speed by displaying single words in succession at a high rate.

Several factors affect our reading speed, like subvocalization (the little voice inside our heads that reads along with us and slows us down), backtracing (rereading parts over and over again), etc. The purpose behind apps like these is to train our minds to get rid of all the other crap. So, by having a steady input of text, we erase our dependency on backtracing. By increasing the reading speed, subvocalization can’t keep up and eventually goes away… we don’t need to subvocalize to process information, as much as we may think we do.

The experience is jarring (as if reading online wasn’t hard enough on the eyes), but it does seem to decrease reading delays. Looks like spreeder’s also working on a login so you can track your speedreading progress. Thanks, Reman! — Gina Trapani

A great video from hacked gadgets:
“YouTube user ChibiChn has come up with a complex but accurate method of transmitting sound using a laser beam. He uses some 555 chips and a small laser to transmit the sound using laser light. Then a photo transistor, a comparator and a audio amplifier are used to receive the […]

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Via make:blog comes a great project for those with spare LED’s and wanting to brush up on their soldering skills:
“Do you have some spare LED’s lying around? Do you have some spare time and are you looking for something to do? Why not make an LED TREE. Its fun as long as […]

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The almighty MAKE: Blog has served up another delicious HOW TO. This time on how to manufacture your own PCBs.
“Refik writes - “This is a little description and a how to make your own professional PCB (printed circuit boards) cheaply. It will help the newbie to get started and a professional to […]

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From make:blog comes, “HOWTO - Solder Resources”:
“Here are a few soldering resources - if you have others you enjoy (online) post on up in the comments!
* Aaron’s guide - “Soldering is defined as “the joining of metals by a fusion of alloys which have relatively low melting points”. […]