Get an Ivy League Education For Free

An Introduction to Open Courses

Did you know you can get an Ivy League education, online for free, with Open Courses from Yale, MIT, Harvard or more. The courses typically consist of filmed lectures and coursework, and while they won’t get you credits, can net you an education from America’s best and brightest professors.

My grandfather, a Yale professor, had a dream in 1976 when recording technology first became usable by a mass audience. A course only needed to be taught once, if say, Einstein taught it. Why teach a lecture to a privileged few when we could record the lecture and everyone rich or poor could watch it via media (tape recording in his day, online streaming video in ours).

You can take a nearly endless number of courses at Yale Open Courses, and the equivalent of many other top schools like MIT. This means full streaming lectures on YouTube and iTunes. This means course work, on your terms, in your timeframe.

Our ability to link almost everyone into the internet and give information to everyone means that, although my grandfather isn’t around to see it, his colleagues and successors brought his dream to life. The goal of FactMyth.com (the site you are on) is to give you an introduction and get you interested. Now that the door is open, why not walk through?

• Yale Open Courses
• MIT Open Courses
• Harvard Open Courses
• Recordings of the full “Neolithic to Now” lectures by Derek de Solla Price, Yale 1976.

TIP: My grandfather Derek de Solla Price wanted his lecture to be the first “canned lecture” (i.e. it might be the first open ware course meant for mass distribution). Cool, right? It never got distributed in his day, but it sums up human history from hunter and gatherer until the mid-70’s and is well worth the listen. See the link above, or see our section on him here.