Free STEM Online

Keeping up with STEM at no Cost

I was blown away the other day when someone from an organization called Online Universities got in touch to say they'd been following my blog and that they had connections with all kinds of free online S.T.E.M. resources, professional development and advanced courseware. No kidding! My follower gave me a link to a blog that lists all kinds of great resources including classes, lecture series, videos, forums, and an array of instructional opportunities to study or simply keep up in the so-called STEM fields. It seems the acronym has really caught on and is being used as a marketing tool. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a way to say in one syllable what could take several paragraphs otherwise, right? It's a way to provide an umbrella for content in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics...all the left-brainers under one roof, so to speak.

The blog post is titled, "50 Best Sources of Free STEM Education Online." The post provides links to programs such as MIT Open Courseware, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Channel, iTunesU, Muppet Labs, Discovery Channel...all great stuff, even help with math. There was a time one would have to spend weeks gathering all this information. Technology has freed up our time for more creative endeavors. Making best use of technology-based resources like these and others provides us with so much more than the task at hand. It changes our world and how we interface with it....changes how we learn, how we communicate, and the depth and breadth of what we can ingest and digest. In many ways, it's how effectively one uses the tools. Learning where to find the information is one of the key steps to effective use of digital tools.