Here is some free training sites that I found that open up the possibility of learning new skills from top colleges for free.
Ok first and foremost I am a student. I go to school for about 4 hours a day then go to work for another 8 hours a day. I am always looking for something that will give me an edge in my classes or just generally help me out with my homework. Because of the internet, I have often felt that I could find a little too much information at my fingertips. I have found that recording my class lectures have always helped me out in the long run, but as with most school recording lectures is not always allowed. Anyway to get to the point, I have found that several classes that I am currently taking have video lectures offered by other school on the subjects that I am taking. For example A&P Biology class is a major class that I have often had trouble with, and Berkeley has offered that same class with video lectures on www.youtube.com. Upon looking around a bit more I have found hundreds of lectures offered by top school for free. These schools include Berkeley, Yale, MIT, and several more. I believe it started with MIT starting a program called open-courseware that offered all their lectures and learning resources to the public and from there other colleges started to jump in on the band wagon.
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I find these programs awesome because it gives people the chance to learn new skills. Although you do not get any college credits from taking the courses it does help you out in gaining the knowledge from following the course. One great example of this is a friend of mine that wanted to learn programming and could not afford college. Together we researched several video lectures to get him started in the IT field so he could decide if he wanted to do that for a living. After about 2 weeks he signed up at the local college for more courses and was already ahead of the game. Here is a small list of video lecture sites to get you started if you feel like looking into this yourself.
www.youtube.com (you need to access the education channel to see the lectures)
http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2008/11/100-awesome-ivy-league-video-lectures/
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/ (this is the open course ware by MIT)
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
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Thu, Aug 27, 2009, by M McLeon
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