Houston - Online courses
Should you like to pursue a course for the pleasure of learning and not for obtaining a degree, do not miss on the opportunity offered by the top universities in the country which have made many courses available for free.
Coursera (www.coursera.org)
We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.
Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.
Edex (www.edex.com)
EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web. Based on a long history of collaboration and their shared educational missions, the founders are creating a new online-learning experience with online courses that reflect their disciplinary breadth. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning–both on-campus and worldwide. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. EdX's goals combine the desire to reach out to students of all ages, means, and nations, and to deliver these teachings from a faculty who reflect the diversity of its audience. EdX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard.
Choosing a distance learning program
With nearly fifty higher education Institutions in Houston alone, many of whom offer distance learning as well as locally based institutions and hundreds of internet based companies offering on-line training, there is an overwhelming choice of opportunities.
These are some of the criteria to mind:
- Check the cost of an entire course and materials, it is very costly to ship large amounts of textbooks from overseas.
- Does the course have industry recognition?
- Check with the local chapter of the relevant professional association for that particular industry to ensure your chosen course has industry recognition (the telephone directory will have the association telephone number or collectively the associations are held in the Encyclopedia of Associations, which is found in the library).
- Where possible, find a recommendation from another student or ask the institute to refer you to a few candidates.
