Orange County Register

Some say the sole goal of education is to liberate the mind, but student loans can put one’s finances in long-term shackles.

Every Friday, Irvine Retail spotlights something to do, see, consume, et al. that doesn’t cost a penny. True freedom to get you through the economic meltdown (and the weekend!) Have an idea for next week’s freebie? Send it here: cbird@ocregister.com

This week: Free online classes at UC Irvine

Enter OpenCourseWare, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative to make undergraduate and graduate courses and course materials available online for free. DISCLAIMER: “UC Irvine OCW does not grant University credit, degrees or certificates for course completion.” See it, then, as free brain food.

UCI has signed on to a growing consortium of schools nationwide–and the inaugural West Coast college–to begin offering classes through OpenCourseWare. This week, Education-portal.com named UCI’s program one of the top ten in the country.

Here’s a somewhat wordy description of the program dispatched in a press release:

“A fully designed and complete learning experience with reading materials, lecture notes, course assignments and exams, linked by a narrative thread, and created by university-approved instructors chosen for their formal education, teaching ability and professional experience.”

So far, UCI has added mainly biz and econ offerings to its catalogue, classes with names like “Spa Operations,” “Fundamentals of Business Analysis” and “Training and Human Resources Development.” Click here to check out the full list of classes, including a handful taught in Spanish and Portuguese.

All class-related stuff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, which, in short, means, users can copy, distribute and transmit work and materials as long as they credit OpenCourseWare, don’t alter, transform or build upon anything or commandeer for commercial purposes. Creative Commons license provide an alternative to more rigid copyright laws.

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