Posted on April 6, 2009 in Resources, Just for Fun

I enjoyed university immensely when I was studying and I have often thought of going back - but the thought of years of night classes, endless homework and the cost have made it impossible.

The internet has always been a source of information and learning, and recently two sites caught my eye that purposefully take online education beyond tutorials or encyclopaedias and aim to provide structured, high-quality content that bears more resemblance to a traditional university experience - but without the hassles.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a new website that shows lectures from universities all over the world on video, including Yale, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT. More courses are being added all the time so personally I'm hoping there'll be some PHP units among them.

You can sit through the whole semester of classes watching the lectures exactly as the enrolled students do. The content is very high quality as you'd expect from the World's best educational institutions, and most lectures even include notes and reading assignments so that you can study exactly the same way as if you were there yourself.

YouTube EDU

YouTube has been used as a training platform since its beginning, with many tutorials, lectures and inspirational speakers being found among the thousands of videos uploaded every day. YouTube EDU is an attempt to make available a higher level of education by providing video of lecturers at universities and colleges in a similar way to Academic Earth.

It uses the same technology and popular interface as the main YouTube site but only allows publishing by the few hundred institutions that are signed up as official partners. There's some great content here but it's not organised by subject matter as neatly as Academic Earth and not all the videos are lectures - some are student interviews or in-house productions.

These websites and others are giving people access to a higher level of education than has previously been available on the internet, so there's nothing you can't learn. And all without the stress of exams!