By Billie Nagy

If you have ever wondered about what it would be like to take a certain course at your favorite college, or if you want to learn more about a subject or major in general, then look no further than OpenCourseWare.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a collection of course lessons created by universities that are made available online to sites like YouTube and Open Culture for the benefit of everyone.

The OpenCourseWare movement started in 1999 at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. However, it really took off with the launch of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare in 2002.  After MIT got on board with the project, a multitude of other universities such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale did as well.

MIT’s reasoning behind OCW was to “enhance human learning worldwide by the availability of a web of knowledge.”  MIT also stated that it would allow students to become better prepared for classes so that they may be more engaged.

All in all, it is essentially getting a small scale education from the nation’s highest colleges and universities –  all for free. Besides YouTube, there is an amazing website called “Open Culture” (www.openculture.com) that most students have not heard about, but should definitely know about.

Besides many other things, the site has almost 900 free online OpenCourseWare courses to choose from and watch, in almost every subject you can think of, stretching from large, popular, and general topics such as business, economics, and history, to very small and specific courses you might not have even heard about such as Anthropology of the South Pacific.

If you have some time, or are curious about different subjects, I would highly recommend checking out this neat and interesting site!