Astronomy Through Teh Intarwebs

We were talking tonight at dinner about distance learning being the wave of the future. A couple of friends of mine are pursuing legitimate online degrees in astronomy, which I think is certainly the ultimate distance learning!  These cost some money, and of course, some time.  But, they fulfill a new take on an old saying, “if you can’t go to the mountain (or the university), bring it to you!”  And the Internet/Web is the delivery mechanism.

But what if you don’t want the degree; just the knowledge?  It turns out there are classes at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through a program called MITOPENCOURSEWARE that are free (with the catch being that you don’t get a degree), but you aren’t paying anything more than your time. (You can donate, however, to help keep the coursework online.)  So, I browsed the course catalog and found such things as Introduction to Astronomy and The Solar System. You simply download the course materials and follow the directions and you’re learning what the MIT kids do!  If you  need the basics, they have math and physics and so forth. I think it would be a great place to brush up on those long-forgotten calc and physics problems!