The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, otherwise known as MIT, offers online courses through the MIT Open Course Ware program. The courses are free for all and you can repeatedly take them as often as you want – for as long as they are available on the website.
Most of the courses come with transcribed notes to provide students with texts of the lectures as seen on the videos. You can print the notes and use these as your reference for school work and projects.
High School Courses
MIT online courses for high school students are among the courses offered through the MIT Open Course Ware program.
The courses, as briefly discussed on the website, are not necessarily the usual courses that actual MIT students may take but they are nonetheless helpful and informative.
Generally, MIT Open Course Ware courses were actual lectures conducted by the school’s faculty and recorded to provide course material for Open Course Ware lessons.
High School Courses Developed by MIT however, were lectures done by student instructors with the exception of:
– Chandra Astrophysics Institute’s course on Astronomy as this was more of an outreach activity by the institute to educate students in Boston about Astrophysics and Astronomy.
– Highlights of Calculus, conducted by Professor Gilbert Strang to show the significance of Calculus on practical applications.
The topics are diverse; covering anything and everything from the Arts, Humanities to the Sciences.
MIT Online Courses for High School Students
There are three general areas of study that MIT provides for online high school learners: Mathematics, Science and the Humanities.
Currently, online courses for Mathematics are the following: Highlight of Calculus, Probability: Random Isn’t So Random, and Combinatronics: The Fine Art of Counting.
For Science, there is the Chandra Astrophysics Institute lecture; and then The Big Questions, Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience, Excitatory Topics in Physics, Guitar Building, and Audio and Speaker Electronics.
The Humanities meanwhile currently offers the following online high school courses: Gödel, Escher, Bach; Europe in Crisis: The World Wars in Europe, and Leadership Training Institute.
The length of the courses varies, usually depending on the number of video lectures and notes are included in the course.
Some courses only come with video lectures while others only come with notes.
The courses are not-for-credit courses but are instead provided to give students additional materials for their actual courses, provide further lessons to enable students to understand better a few of their courses, or simply to provide free online courses that are interesting and informative at the same time.
