Get Ivy League Lectures for Free

What are the chances of the average Pinoy to get into Harvard or Yale?  Unless you have the grades or the money, or both, your chances are pretty slim.  But don’t worry, there’s good news ahead.  Thanks to the internet, we can access free lectures from these high-profile universities.

And we’re not limited to Ivy League schools either – we can access lectures from most major colleges and universities around the globe.

iTunesU

Apple’s venture into free online learning starts with iTunesU.  Basically, it’s where major universities and colleges upload video and audio lectures which anybody can download for free.  Participating universities include Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and many others.

First of all, you need to have iTunes installed in your computer to access iTunesU. If you don’t have iTunes yet, click here to download it.

Once iTunes is open, click on the “iTunes Store” link on the left sidebar, and when you get to the store, find the link that takes you to iTunesU.  You can then browse lectures by subject or by school.

iTunesU also has a separate section that collects lectures discussing the economic downturn we’re experiencing right now.  You can see this section when you scroll down the iTunesU section of the iTunes Store.

Open Yale

Yale University also recently launched Open Yale, where you can access full lectures on different subjects including Astronomy, BioChemical Engineering, Economics, Physics, History, Philosophy, English, and Political Science.

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Where to find free (or cheap) books

It’s no secret that I love books. I try to read at least 20 books a year (my former creative writing profs would argue that this isn’t enough). However, books are generally expensive. In fact, you’re very lucky if you find a brand new book from a major bookstore at only P 150.00. In fact, browsing through National Bookstore’s online catalog, the cheapest fiction book I could find was A Pocket Book of Short Stories from Simon and Schuster for 85 pesos. And guess what? You can actually download all those short stories from the internet for free.

If you’re an avid reader who doesn’t want to burn a hole in both your pockets just because you happen to love books, here are some frugal ways you can acquire them:

Where to find CHEAP books:

Used books stores. One of my favorite used books stores is Diplomat Bookstore in P.Tuazon, in the Daily Supermarket Complex. Scout and I acquired Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover for a mere P149. When we went there this weekend, they even had a sale – some shelves were P99/book, and buy 1 take 1 to boot! That means P49.50 per book. We took advantage of this deal and added 2 new interesting books to our collection. Apart from the great price, many of Diplomat’s used books look good as new.

I also like the used book stalls in Riverbanks Mall in Marikina. There’s 2 of them there, and other stalls have a used books/magazine section as well. I found Michael Cunningham’s The Hours for P100 (it looked brand new) and a Woody Allen collection that was already out of publication (it looked new too, and cost me only P200).

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Free Personal Finance Ebook

There’s a free personal finance ebook available at Mytwodollars.com . “Money Matters for All Ages: A Guide to Taking Control of Your Finances from Birth to Retirement” is a comprehensive collection of personal finance and frugality tips that may prove to be useful, no matter how old you are. This includes infants and young children, teenagers, college-aged people, and people in their twenties up to the sixties. This ebook also covers advice for retirees. This series was even featured on MSN Money.

Here’s a description from the website:

This e-book is the culmination of sixteen different personal finance bloggers who got together and decided to write a financial guidebook that spans an entire lifetime. From the innocent little infant to the older retiree, all the different stages of life are covered here. Whether you are in your 20’s or 30’s or any other age — you can benefit from reading this book.

I’ll be taking a quick look myself, and I might even post a review. So far, it looks like we can all learn a thing or two from this handy resource.

Click here to download the ebook. Once you’ve read it, feel free to share your comments with us.

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