SELF-EDUCATION PLACES IN INTERNET, LUGARES DE EDUCACIÓN AUTODIDACTA Y GRATIS

En el mundo anglosajón existe un movimiento que considera la educación avanzada uno de los pilares fundamentales de la evolución humana. Entienden que el cambio solo es posible desde cada uno de nosotros. La mentalidad crítica del ciudadano, su resistencia al engaño, y en definitiva su propio criterio depende del acceso a una educación abierta y no ligada a un plan educativo determinado impuesto por ningún gobierno.

• Open Yale Courses (English) – Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet.
• Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students – These guidelines for engineering writing and scientific writing are designed to help students communicate their technical work.
• MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies – The MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies gives students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication and digital media.
• Merriam-Webster Online – In this digital age, your ability to communicate with written English is paramount skill. And M-W.com is the perfect resource to improve your English now.
• National Novel Writing Month – Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
• Lifewriting – A complete text of the 9-week writing class a professor taught for years at UCLA.
• Guide to Grammar and Writing – Grammar and writing techniques, lessons and quizzes.
• Purdue Online Writing Lab – Over 200 free resources including lessons on: writing, research, grammar, and style guides.

Foreign and Sign Languages

• BBC Languages – Teach yourself a new spoken language online.
• American Sign Language Browser – Teach yourself sign language online.
• Livemocha – Start learning a new language online for free.
• Learn10 – Gives you a language learning habit that’s hard to kick. 10 new words; everywhere, every day.
• One Minute Languages – Learn a new language via podcasts that are updated regularly.
• Mango Languages – Over 100 lessons, shown to you in PowerPoint style with interstitial quizzes, to move you through any language without cracking a book.

Multiple Subjects and Miscellaneous

• OpenLearn – The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. Multiple subjects are covered.
• Capilano University OpenCourseWare – The Capilano University OpenCourseWare site is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.
• University of Southern Queensland’s OpenCourseWare – Provides access to free and open educational resources for faculty members, students, and self-learners throughout the world.
• YouTube EDU – Educational videos on YouTube organized by subject matter.
• LearnHub Test Prep – Raise your test scores with free practice tests & counseling on various subjects.
• iTunes U – Hundreds of universities — including Stanford, Yale and MIT — distribute lectures, slide shows, PDFs, films, exhibit tours and audio books through iTunes U. The Science section alone contains content on topics including agriculture, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and geography.
• United Nations University OpenCourseWare – Showcases the training and educational programs implemented by the University in a wide range of areas relevant to the work of the United Nations.
• Brigham Young Independent Study – BYU Independent Study now offers free courses in different areas of study. These areas include Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study, Personal Dev elopement, etc. Use these courses as a starting point for your personal studies or just to add insight to an area of interest.
• University of Utah OpenCourseWare – Provides access to free and open educational resources for faculty members, students, and self-learners throughout the world.
• United States Nation Archives – The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper. Valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.
• Wikiversity – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.
• UMass Boston OpenCourseWare – Various online classes provided free by UMass Boston.
• About U – A collection of free online educational courses from About.com.
• Academic Earth – Online degrees and video courses from leading universities.
• Free-Ed – Clusters of courses that support your preparation for today’s fastest-growing careers and critical academic disciplines.
• Connexions – A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute.
• TED – Motivational and educational lectures from noteworthy professionals around the world.
• Intute – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities.
• Boston College Front Row – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

Free Books and Reading Recommendations

• LibraryThing – LibraryThing connects you to other people who are reading what you’re reading and allows you to see which books are popular in various categories of reading.
• Textbook Revolution – Links to free online textbooks and other educational materials.
• Book TV – This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.
• Bookboon – Bookboon provides online textbooks for students in PDF format. The free ebooks can be downloaded without registration. Our books are legal and written exclusively for Bookboon. They are financed by a few in-book ads.
• Scribd – Scribd, the online document sharing site which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and other popular formats. You can download a document or embed it in your blog or web page.
• BookYards – BookYards is a web portal in which books, education materials, information, and content will be freely to anyone who has an internet connection.
• Planet eBook – Free classic literature to download and share.
• E-Books Directory – Thousands of ebooks on various subjects to download and share.
• Read Print Library – Free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.GoodReads – Get great book recommendations and keep track of what you want to read.
• The Online Books Page – University of Pennsylvania database with over 30,000 books.
• Public Literature – Thousands of familiar classics, children’s books, plays and poems, as well as books by new authors.
• Full Books – Thousands of full-text nonfiction and fiction books.
• Many Books – Free fiction and nonfiction ebooks for your PDA, iPod or ebook reader.
• Get Free Books – Thousands of free ebooks to download.
• Project Gutenberg – More than 20,000 free books from the first producer of free e-books.
• Bibliomania – Thousands of classic books, poems, short stories and plays.
• Classic Reader – Large collection of free classic books, plays, and short stories from more than 300 authors.
• Bartleby Fiction – Classic anthologies and volumes.
• The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List – MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA features the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research.
• Books Should Be Free – Free audio books from the public domain.

Educational Mainstream Broadcast Media

• BBC Learning – Online learning, support, and advice. This site offers internal and offsite links to a vast amount of materials.
• Biography – The site holds videos to past interviews and biographies on people in topics that range from Black history to women’s history.
• Book TV – This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.
• CBC Archives — Relive Canadian history through thousands of available radio and television clips.
• Discovery — This channel is home to several different networks that focus on the military, animals, travel, etc. The Discovery site offers a “Video of the Day” from its home page, a separate online video section, and a Discover Education center where teachers can accumulate materials for K-12 teaching. It’s impossible to list all their offerings here, so go discover!
• History Channel – Visit the Video Gallery for a selection on historical topics. Like the Discovery Channel, this network provides many opportunities for you to gain access to information and reference materials.
• NOVA — Watch current science shows or browse by category. PBS sponsors this channel.
• Research Channel — Speakers, researchers and professors present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries. Use their Webstreams and an extensive video-on-demand library for research.
• Weather Channel – You can learn about weather all over the world, but the Weather Channel also offers dynamic content based upon seasons and special conditions and a special multimedia and education section.

Online Archives

• American Memory – The Library of Congress provides extensive multimedia offerings on various topics through their American Memory Collection, including their outstanding Built in America project that showcases historical buildings through photographs.
• Fathom – This archive, provided by Columbia University, offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by its member institutions. The archives include online learning resources including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and seminars.
• Internet Archive Open Educational Resources – A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
• National Archives – Provides primary source materials from NARA along with lesson plans for teaching with those sources.
• National Climatic Data Center – The NCDC, a division of NOAA, maintains climatic archives, including lists of storms in given counties, and records about global extremes, etc.
• The Rosetta Project – A global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of all documented human languages.
• September 11 Digital Archive – This site uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the 9/11 attacks.
• U.S. Census Bureau – If you think the Census Bureau is all about numbers, you might be surprised to learn about their archived photographs, daily radio features, and more available through their Newsroom.

Directories of Open Education

• Google Scholar – Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
• OpenCourseWare Consortium – This site provides a portal to search through hundreds of free courses or to add new courses you know about to the database.
• iBerry – Check out this site for a huge directory of open courseware organized by school and subject matter that can point you in the right direction for any type of learning.
• Self Made Scholar Directory – Free online directory of web-based classes and courses.

Please add to the resource list via the comments section if you know of a valuable site we left off the list.

Photo by: Steve Keys