A Guide to Free Online CourseWare

Provided By: Associated Content, Inc.

If you've been to college, you might remember being able to check out a potentially interesting course for free by auditing it -- that is, sitting in on classes to learn without getting credit. Well, the same opportunity is now available online in the form of OpenCourseWare, the college curriculum equivalent of open-source software, which is software whose source code is freely available to others who want to use it or build other applications using that code as a foundation.

The idea of offering a free college curriculum online began with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001, and has since seen participation from a number of other advanced educational institutions.