Smash Deals & Coupons

College costs a lot. That is no secret. And it's a sad fact that one in five American households have higher education debt. The average loan amount for those households is over $26,000. That is a big big number. With the way things are with the economy today - and for the near future - when it takes college graduates a lot of time to find a job, a lot of them end up defaulting on these loans.

I am not trying to deter people from going to college here. I understand it's the experience AND the college that you pay for. But there are a lot of us who don't have the money or the time to go to college. Or may be you are somewhere in the world where even with those two you just don't have an available opportunity to go to college. So what can you? Well, we you can take college classes online, for free. Yep, recently schools, starting with some of the big name Ivies, have realized that it doesn't take much to simply upload their course content online. Teachers aren't really grading any exams for these course and so the cost to distribute course material is almost nothing. They understand that people who will be taking these course aren't likely to be able to pay for these in a "real" course anyway, just like I explained.

So where do you take these courses? A lot of schools have setup their own online course distribution websites, but the best place to start are the initiatives that bring courses from multiple schools together, for example:

• Coursera: Includes almost 200 courses (at the time of this post) from Ivy League schools like Princeton, UPenn and more.
• Udacity: 14 free science and technology related courses designed and developed by top instructors in the field.
• Learning Space: Over 600 course from the UK's Open University.

Entry Tags: College & Education, Careers & Job Search