Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The Saylor Foundation

The Saylor Foundation

This is a site that is setup to provide free collegiate level coursework to anyone, free of charge. There are assignments available, and testing that will allow you to progress and state that you've completed a certain major.

Right now they have 13 areas including:
General Education
Psychology
Business Adminstration
and others

I flipped through some reading on Business, Psychology, Neuropsychology, and Differential Equations as they can be used in numerical analysis. This is very high quality work here, developed and edited by reputable professionals in each of the fields. The psychology and neuropsychology topics that I skimmed was as high level as I was learned in Med School. The Mechanical Engineering topics seemed to be just as well presented as what I saw during my undergrad years at the Mech. Engr program I attended (in the top 10 in the nation).

They have paid positions for Deans, Professors, Contributing Editors, Interns, and others... They're even having competitions to see who can develop textbooks that can be used, with each winner of the contest receiving $20,000 for their work.

This is absolutely amazing stuff. I have no idea why, but I could spent many months just reading all of the materials available on here. I honestly think resources like this will radically change higher education as we know it. All that's needed is for the certification of completion to be trusted by employers in the real world. Though I think the Khan Academy is doing great things, for some reason this implementation feels much more concrete and reputable. Instead of the one guy doing each lecture after he reads on stuff, the material is developed and presented by existing professors in each field.

Also, when I was flipping through the reading on Runge-Kutte methods of computationally estimating the results of ordinary differential equations, I came out with a newfound respect for some of the resources on wikipedia. The explanation page on wiki for Runge-Kutta is nothing short of amazing...

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