A college education or even near-college education can do you wonders in this world. The knowledge and information that you can obtain in a college can be both useful and empowering. But for most people, college is expensive, and is often inaccessible to them for many reasons.

But how would you like to learn the exact same things you’d learn in a college, with no tuition fee? In fact, you wouldn’t even have to leave your computer chair.

Thanks to the internet and some thoughtful people, it is now possible to get a free college education online. Many other people in history have self-taught themselves and have gone on to do great things, like Albert Einstein or Alexander Graham Bell. A simple Google search will show you that the amount of free educational materials and courses online is so much higher than you’d expect.

There are drawbacks however. It is quite difficult to learn this fancy information without a legitimate teacher, though all the courses and the course materials are usually offered by many colleges and universities free in many forms, including podcasts or online lectures. While doing this will make you smarter and give you the education you so desire or deserve, you usually will not be awarded any degrees or college credit.

Here are just a few of the many resources that are made available to you as long as you have the internet:

1. Learn some history

http://www.extension.washington.edu/openuw/

Here are the following history courses offered at that site:

• The American Civil War
• Energy, Diet and Weight
• Greek Mythology
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Hamlet
• HTML Basics
• History of Jazz: New Orleans
• The American Revolution
• Shakespeare’s Comedies
• Heroic Fantasy: Tolkien
• World War II

2. Supplement your learning with some videos

http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html

You have to sign up, but it’s easy and free. This site offers all of Annenberg’s Media programs (quite a few) as long as you have a broadband connection. The videos range from the history of American cinema to an introduction to Chemistry.

3. Read a little

Browse the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html for a huge selection of books and literature of all kinds.

4. Mathematics

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html

Get free online notes, lectures, videos, and even textbooks in many mathematic courses from New York University.

5. Get an MIT education

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

This is definitely one of the largest collection of open courseware on the net today. MIT offers over 1800 of their courses, complete with syllabuses, lectures, notes, and even exams. The next time someone asks you about architecture, why not bring up the fact that you’ve studied the class through MIT?

Why limit yourself? You don’t have to have gone to college to get a college education. You don’t even need to go to high school! You can start these courses anytime; if you can read and understand these courses at age 7, go for it! Or maybe you’re 70 and you’d like to spend some of your free time learning some new things. Whatever the case, there are boundless resources on the internet that will let you finally achieve the college education you want.