I’ve been a fan of open education for some time and recently have been intrigued by the revival of the “free” business model debate by Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly, among others. So, conflating the two, I decided to undertake what turned into a “pulling a thread on a sweater” exercise and see how much free online learning I could find on the Web relatively quickly. Free online courses, free education sites, free CE, free CME - basically anything free and educational that I could find. I’ve included some notes and observations on this exercise below, but first I’ll cut to the chase and offer a brief table of contents for what follows:

• Tutorial, How-to, and Aggregation Sites
• Big Idea and Debate Sites
• Higher Education, Continuing Education, and Open Education
• Free CE, CME, and CEU
• Topical Areas
  • At Home
  • Business and Professional Skills
  • Dance
  • Economics
  • Handy Things to Know
  • Health
  • Human Resources
  • International Development
  • Language, Spelling, and Grammar
  • Law
  • Math
  • Music and Art
  • Sports, Recreation, and Hobbies
  • Theological
  • Web and Computer Skills

If you are interested in finding more free online education, you might also want to consider subscribing to the Free Learning Monitor.

Now for the notes and observations:
First, this is obviously nowhere near a comprehensive list. There are who knows how many sites out there, and for the purposes of this post, I have confined myself to sites that offer relatively formalized free online learning experiences and state this as their explicit purpose. Truth is, there is almost no place on the Web where you can learn something.

Next, I made an effort to categorize things in a relatively logical way below and even to start a key of sorts:

• T – Text-based offerings (usually with still graphics)
• A – Audio without Video
• V – Video offerings
• I – Interactive
• C – Offered as customer education, i.e. part of a corporate marketing strategy or as a way to promote sales of other products.

I clearly have no future as a librarian, however, as I finally felt like I had to give up on pursuing this and go back to earning a living, spending time with my family, etc. Perhaps I will manage to fill it over time. (Or kind readers can share their knowledge of these sites in the comments.) If I do continue to do more with this, it is probably better suited for a wiki anyway.

Finally, the main point to all of this is simply that there is so much available out there for free—even things that offer credit—and given how easy it is for non-technical subject matter experts to contribute content, it will only keep growing. Quality is all over the place right now, but I suspect competition among aggregators and the growing influence of the open education movement will drive higher quality over time. All of this suggests at least a couple of things, in my opinion:

• If part of your business strategy is to generate revenue from learning experiences provided to members, customers, or students and you haven’t yet considered how “free” impacts you, it’s high time.

• “Free” learning could potentially be one of the better forms of customer engagement in the world of the new Web—though this does not come without issues, as Stephen Downes and Lisa Neal have pointed out in a recent issue of eLearn Magazine.

The list follows. Please let me know any major gaps you see, and it would be great to hear from readers about how “free” fits into their organization’s strategy for learning. Also, let me know any sites you think need to be listed here.

JTC

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Tutorial, How-to, and Aggregation Sites

There are starting to be quite a lot of these sites and you have to wonder just how many can manage to stay in business. Still, I think a probable upside of all the competition for free online learning will be an increase in expectations and the resulting quality of the offerings.

• 5min Life Videopedia (V)
• About.com and About U (T, V)
• Brain Honey (T)
• eHow (T,V)
• ExpertVillage (V)
• HouseholdHacker (V)
• Helpfulvideo.com (V)
• Howcast.com (V)
• instructables (T,V)
• ITunes University (A, V)
• koonji (T,V)
• LearnHub (T,V,I)
• LearnOutLoud.com (A,V)
• Make (T,V)
• sclipo (V)
• SuTree (V)
• TeacherTube (V)
• TrickLife (V)
• videojug (V)
• ViewDo.com (V)
• WannaLearn.com
• wikiHow (T)
• Training 02 (added April 23, 2008)

“Big Idea” and Debate Sites

Big Think is the newest entrant here. I am sure there are other sites like this that I don’t yet know about. These are places where you can see some of your favorite gurus being gurus and add your two cents.

• BigThink
• FORA.tv
• TED

Higher Education, Continuing Education, and Open Education

This list won’t come close to doing justice to what is going on out there in the world of open education, but suffice to say that between universities, NGOs, and foundation funded projects, there is practically nothing that you can’t learn online for free, and in many cases, take the underlying intellectual property and re-configure it to your own needs under an Creative Commons or other “copyleft” license.

• Annenberg Media (V)
• University of Washington
• Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative
• Open Yale
• WebCasts/Courses.Berkeley
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• Utah State University OpenCourseWare
• China Open Resources for Education (English news site with links)
• Free and Affordable Distance Learning
• Free-Ed.Net
• Fulbright Economics Teaching Program (Vietnam)
• Japan OpenCourseWare Alliance
• Johns Hopkins OpenCourseware
• Oops - Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (Taiwan)
• ParisTech OpenCourseWare
• Tufts OpenCourseware
• Universia OpenCourseWare (Spanish/Portuguese)
• African Virtual University
• Princeton Archive Lectures
• School of Everything
• Qedoc
• Connexions
• HippoCampus
• ITrainOnline
• Live Content
• OLCOS
• OER Commons
• Open2.Net
• Open Courseware Consortium
• OpenLearn
• Open Media Commons
• Open of Course
• FlossCom.Net: Community-based Educational Approaches
• Sofia: Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets
• Self (Sharing Knowledge about Free Software)
• The Bazaar
• WikiEducator
• The Final Club
• University of California - San Diego

Free CE,CME, and CEU

I could post another 100 links just in this area alone. It is tricky terrain though. You have to pay attention to the fine print that tells you things like when the availability of credit expires or whether just the course/article content and not the credit (or vice-versa) is free. Particularly in the health arena, most of the “free” CE tends to be sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and medical supply manufacturers–not necessarily a bad thing, but something to keep in mind. Health-related CE also tends to be some of the less-inspired learning out there–often, for instance, credit is attached to nothing more than a journal article.

• CMEcorner.com (T,V)
• FreeCE.com (Healthcare)
• FreeCME.com (Clinical Specialties)
• HIVandHepatitis.com
• Interior Design Magazine
• March of Dimes (Genetics)
• Medscape (Healthcare, requires registration)
• nurseCEU.com
• Power-Pak C.E. (Healthcare)
• RxSchool (Pharmacy)
• studentdoc (Healthcare)
• Meco Sports Medicine
• Medi-smart
• National Association of Social Workers

Topical Areas

All of the above links are for destinations where a wide variety of topics are covered, but there are also any number of Web sites or YouTube videos covering a single topic or a handful of related topics. The list below is admittedly a fairly eclectic collection of examples.

At Home

• HomeDecorating.com (T)
• Learn to Cook Peking Duck (V)

Business and Professional Skills

• Bartending 101 (Training DVD)
• Learn to Drive a 18 Wheeler (V) Lesson 1, Lesson 2
• Building a .com in 24 hours
• keybr.com (Typing practice)
• Small Business Administration online courses

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Dance

• Moshunpics on YouTube (V) Covers a variety of dance forms from waltz, to bachata, to meringue, to basic ballroom.
• Learn-to-Belly-Dance.com
• Learn to Disco (V)
• Learn to Breakdance (Moonwalk) (V,C)

Economics

• Economics Education Web

Handy Things to Know

• Learn How to Massage (V)

Economics

• Economics Education Web
• Tutor2U.com

Handy Things to Know

• Learn How to Massage (V)

Health

• Learn CPR

Human Resources

• Economic Research Institute 54 free courses, credit available

International Development

• eLearning for Development

Language, Spelling, and Grammar Skills

• iTalki (T, I)
• Study Spanish (T, C)
• Free Homeschool Curriculum Spelling Course
• Conversational Mandarin Chinese Online
• Hungarian Language
• A Swedish Language Course
• Turkish Lessons
• Polish Grammar
• Greek and Latin
• Word2Word (Nearly all languages)

See also the collection of language learning widgets in More Than 50 Web Widgets for Your Learning Mix.

Law

• Collection of Links at University of Michigan (T)

Math and Science

• Free Science and Video Lectures Online (T, V)
• A First Course in Linear Algebra
• Introduction to Probability (Dartmouth) (I)
• Online Math Center (T)
• Interactive Mathematics Materials (Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching (T,I)

Music and Art

• Introduction to Reading Music (T)
• Learn Harmonica (T, Audio only in Members Area, Videos “coming soon”)
• Rockongoodpeople on YouTube (Video) Various lesson on guitar, home recording, and setting up for live shows.
• Learn to Chant (T, A)
• Learn to Play the Ukelele (V, C) Part I , Part II
• Freedrumlessons on YouTube (V) Covers rock, jazz, Latin…you name it!
• Learn to Draw.com (T)
• Learn to Draw Portraits (V)

Sports, Recreation, and Hobbies

• How to Snowboard for the First Time (T)
• Learn to Juggle (Animation)
• Learn to Crochet (T, C)
• Learn to Play Craps (V, C)
• Learn to Play Bridge (T)
• Learn to Wakeboard (V, C)
• Learn to Sew (T)
• Learn to Jamskate.net (T, A, V)
• Learn How to Knit (V) Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3

Theological

• Covenant Theological Seminary
• Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Web and Computer Skills

• Commoncraft (Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks, Social Bookmarking, RSS)
• GCFLearnFree.org
• Make an AJAX site in Less Than 10 Minutes
• Web Design from Scratch
• Learn to Script (Windows)
• Stanford CS Education Library (W, V)

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