Hi, Zed Omegas! I wanted to drop by and share some of the learning resources I’ve used in the past few years - stuff you may or may not find useful in your unschooling endeavors. It becomes easier every year to share knowledge across the internet, and individuals and organizations are really starting to take advantage of that. Here’s a list of places where I’ve found and used learning tools to expand my knowledge. (Of course, sometimes expanding knowledge is as easy as hitting the “random” button on wikipedia a few times…)

MIT OpenCourseWare - some of the “courses” are basically reading lists and syllabi, but others are fully developed and highly interactive. Even reading lists can be useful - I’ve used them to select books from the library and structure my own little course. There are over 2100 MIT courses here. If you’re into math and science (or even if you’re not!), I highly recommend the physics video lectures - they are amazing.

Khan Academy - This is a project with an interesting history. Salman Khan was a hedge fund analyst who began tutoring one of his cousins in math. He developed some online tutorials for other family members, and the popularity of his tutorials actually inspired him to quit his job and work on building Khan Academy, which is free, open-source learning on a number of topics: math, science, computer science, finance and economics, and test prep materials, plus a couple of humanities courses.

iTunes U - (link is a bit useless, sorry - it’s easier to just go to iTunes U in the iTunes software) iTunes U is kind of a smorgasbord of stuff: literature courses, language courses, history courses, science, math… all from some of the world’s top universities. My favorite distributors of content are UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and Oxford, but there’s so much here, it’s hard to resist sampling a little of everything.

edX - This is a joint project of MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley. Courses are offered for free, and there are even mastery certificates available for learners (there may be a small fee for certificates in the future, but the idea is to make learning and mastery inexpensive and available to as many as possible).

OpenStax College - free, peer-reviewed and open-source textbooks covering fundamental college courses. (I think we need MORE of these, and more open-source books for public schools and home learners/unschoolers, as well!)

I know this list is a little science/math-heavy; the MIT OCW and iTunes U do have a wide variety of liberal arts and fine art courses to peruse, though! I hope some of it is useful to you or the others who are following along with your self-directed study.

-Brandie