Study Architecture at MIT with MIT Open CourseWare

Have you ever dreamed of going to MIT to study architecture? Ever wonder what it would be like? What courses would they teach, what do they put emphasis on etc? Well wonder no more, because with MIT Open Courseware, you can go to MIT for free.

MIT Open CourseWare is a web publication that includes all of MIT’s course content, and it is available to anyone and everyone. So Okay, you won’t really be considered a student at MIT, so you wont actually be able to go to campus and attend classes for free. Sorry to get your hopes up. BUT if you have the determination and drive you can go through the same courses their students are and gain a similar knowledge.

The website itself is easy to manage. Want to see some of MIT’s courses on architecture? Click courses, go down to department and select architecture. It’s as easy as that. They display both undergraduate and graduate courses. From architecture studios, to Fundamentals of Energy in Buildings, Visual Arts, Religious Architecture, you name it, they have it.

When you click on a course like Basic Structural Design, it gives you a course description, name of the professor, when that particular course was taught, its level and what the course features. Some include projects, assignments, course readings and quizzes. What I really enjoy about this database is that it can be used as supplemental information for anyone. What I mean by that is if I’m writing a paper on say the architecture of Cairo for example, and can’t find any sources that really appeal to my needs, I can go to the MIT Open CourseWare, go to the architecture dept., and search through the readings of the Architecture in Cairo Course. Easy as that.

And it’s not limited to just architecture (I’m slightly bias towards it myself), there are courses from their School of Engineering, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, School of Science, School of Management and other programs offered at MIT.

MIT Open CourseWare averages around 1 million visitors to its website every month, with a majority of users being students, self-learners and educators.

I know I’ll probably never be an actual student at MIT, but this gets ya pretty close.

You can visit the site for yourself here http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm 

-A