Fast forward 15 years (amazing how time flies) and the same holds true but teaching yourself has become even easier. If you can swing the cost of an iPAd (actually any PC) and steal someone's WiFi or visit a free Wi Fi area, you have access to some outstanding courses available for free on iTunes U.See the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda' got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
-Good Will Hunting
I downloaded the iTunes U app last night. I hadn't checked it out in awhile and came away impressed with the amount of free knowledge available and so well structured.
While Apple has introduced it's new text format (worth downloading the free "Our Living Earth" textbook to try out if you have iPad 1/2 updated to 5.01), those new textbooks haven't found their way into iTunes U yet. That will make these course so much better than they are.
MIT, Yale, Stanford, etc all have courses in iTunes U along with a fuck ton of other schools. The courses range from high level science to philosophy. Many are video format lectures filmed in classrooms while some are audio only lectures. Some include the course assignments and answers, tests, etc.
Randomly chosen, I checked out a Philosophy course, "Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love" by taught by David O'Conner at Notre Dame.
It's video format, 27 ~30 minute lectures focusing on Plato's Symposium, Shakespeare and short stories by Andre Dubus (the last being the Catholic influence of the school). In this case, the professor was clear, easy to understand, and was able to get his points across in a course that mainly dealt with human love. Viewed as if you were near the back of a theater style lecture hall, it was interesting to watch a female (only her leg was visible), legs crossed, bounce her foot up and down, which is a subtle form of masturbation, at various points in the lecture. Perhaps the instructor used that to gauge whether he was getting his point across or not!
I watched the first lecture (first day of class) and a lecture in the middle of the course. In this case, I never heard a question asked, but in some other courses there was interaction. Really, I don't see any benefit you would have gotten from this course from having paid 1,000+ for it as opposed to the free online offering.
In some other examples, I found some good, some bad.
A University of Michigan course on Shakespeare for example had terrible audio, given in what sounded like huge classroom, with the instructor needing to yell everything. I didn't get too far but he seemed to enjoy talking about himself and his joy of teaching and I didn't learn a thing about Shakespeare for the time I listened. It seems that U of M designs their classrooms with the same audio properties as their football stadium!
On the other hand, In a marketing course originating from Arizona State University, the audio was clear. Each of the student tables had their own microphone which they pressed when asking a question, which made for an excellent experience as an online listener.
I found the number of schools offering similar topics impressive as well. Using philosophy again as an example, you could choose a course from Yale, UC Berkely, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and even MIT (which you wouldn't think of for that topic)...along with a host of other schools.
My example was Philosophy but all areas are covered. There's a "Calculus Revisited" course from MIT that funk might want to check out. (Another being "Highlights of Calculus, also from MIT) I watched a little of a course from MIT, "Physics III: Vibrations and Waves". I didn't have a fucking clue what he was talking about as I jumped into a video in the middle of the course but it was very well presented and he promised to explain everything I ever wanted to know about rainbows!
There are tech courses (programming), Medical, etc etc.
This is all available for free as long as you have any kind of PC and internet access. Combine this with well structured, interactive multimedia textbooks apple just introduced and you've got some solid tools to teach yourself. It's not all great. The quality varies, as in a real school environment, some professors are more memorable than others and some schools handle the format and presentation better than others...but in the case of iTunes U, you didn't pay a dime and can "drop" the course and choose another without feeling like you just wasted a bundle of cash or added to your dept...or wasted time traveling to the University.
Apple isn't everyone's favorite company right now but they do deserve some credit for creating a great centralized place for schools to add free content. Their "walled garden" gets panties bunched up with lots of people but at the same time, they do take the time to create great apps, such as the iBook creator, that if you haven't seen yet makes it super easy to create a multimedia textbook, and create an easy to access place to put those books, whether you want to offer them for free or charge. In the case of iTunes U, it's all free. Podcasts are 99.9% free. While you can get podcasts anywhere, Apple gets credit for initially creating an easy, centralized place to access them.
Really all it takes is self motivation. There are no excuses when it comes to education anymore. You may not get your little piece of paper showing you have a degree, but if you're smart and resourceful, you can teach yourself and do well, and in the case of courses like marketing and software development, combined with the brain dead easy way to offer up your creations for sale in the App store, etc, you just might need that little piece of paper after all.