About a year after I graduated college, I started to feel the organized education itch. I didn't miss college life (much), but I missed formalized learning. I wish I had the self discipline to compel myself to study all the topics I'm interested in on my own time without outside encouragement, but I find that I don't. I really need guidance and deadlines to make more than fitful progress. I'm not ready to embark on the obligation or expense of grad school, so I was delighted to discovered that I can take courses from prestigious universities free online.
One excellent website for this is Coursera. It offers select courses from dozens of universities around the world, modified for a massive online student enrollment - though not for credit. Professors record lectures, set homework, assign quizzes, and provide discussion forums. Some of the more invested arrange Google+ hangouts and spend lots of time responding to student questions on the forums.
Each class is run a little differently depending on the subject matter, University, and professor. Some courses are just lectures and quizes. Others have programming assignments, peer-reviewed writing assignments, or exams, or requirements to engage in the discussion forums. They range from 1-2 hours of work per week to many many more.
A very select few courses can now be taken for actual University credit. Many more provide a signed certificate of completion for students who finish the course with a certain level achievement. Others are taken just for the joy of learning.
I recently completed "Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" offered by the University of Edinburgh via Coursera. It was very low workload, just 1-2 hours of lectures and 2 quizzes per week for 5 weeks, but very rewarding. For such a small investment, I feel that I learned a lot about the definition of life, theories on possible origins, extremes of conducive environments, the "habitability" of other planetary bodies, and the measures being used to search for life elsewhere in the universe. I had no idea, for example, that there is a chance of finding past or present life in our own solar system on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, or Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Fascinating! I'm looking forward to taking more courses in the future.
Here are a few starting soon that look really good:
An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (starting April 15th)
Greek and Roman Mythology (starting April 22nd)
Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources (starting May 20th)
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