WANT TO LEARN A NEW SKILL FOR FREE?

With unemployment at a 30-year high, many of us are looking to learn new skills that will help us find new jobs or just to make us more valuable employees in general.  But the high cost of most continuing education courses often puts learning those skills out of our reach.  However, there is a new movement, the open-courseware movement, that offers something revolutionary:  free class materials made available online for anyone who wants to use them.

Among the many new sources of free open-courseware is ITunes.com.  “Free” isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Apple’s ITunes store but if you click on the ITunes U icon you will find more than 200,000 free educational media files from prestigious universities to download directly onto your computer and IPod.  You can learn how to use software programs such as Power Point, Excel, and Photoshop.  You can also take a beginner’s Spanish class, MIT’s Introduction to Psychology, or Yale Business and Management’s How to Write a Business Plan class and they’re all free.

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October 22nd, 2009 | Tags: Free continuing education courses | Category: Daily Blog, Economy