Since grad­u­at­ing from col­lege almost three years ago (Christ), I’ve really missed the con­ve­nience and fun of orga­nized edu­ca­tion. There are a mil­lion things I wish I knew more about, but that I don’t know where to start look­ing to learn: anthro­pol­ogy, soci­ol­ogy, lit­er­a­ture, art his­tory, psy­chol­ogy, more phi­los­o­phy, more lin­guis­tics, math, physics… I’d love to go to col­lege for­ever, col­lect­ing degrees in everything.

I’ve won­dered for a long time whether there were any online cur­ric­ula avail­able to fol­low. Sure, some courses on some uni­ver­si­ties’ web­sites had pub­licly avail­able syl­labi, but not many. And those that do aren’t very thor­ough. I fig­ured there must be tons of peo­ple like me who have banded together to cre­ate some­thing bet­ter than this, like an online book club but with more focus.

I found out today that MIT is doing exactly this. They’ve come up with Open­Course­Ware, which presents, in an amaz­ingly orga­nized fash­ion, all the mate­r­ial you need (or ref­er­ences to it) for a large num­ber of classes. I don’t know where to start. For­tu­nately, now that I live so close to MIT, I’m sure I can get almost all of the nec­es­sary read­ing mate­r­ial at the library down the street, and, if all goes well, get started with one of these classes.

Also of inter­est is Wikiver­sity, which aims to offer a broad, free, online edu­ca­tion via Wik­i­books’ open-content text­books. Pro­pos­als are still being made, and the logis­tics of it are only roughly sketched at this point, but there seems to be a lot of excite­ment about the pos­si­bil­i­ties behind this framework.