Grow your business: 4 ways to find free educational courses on line
Wanting to brush up on my financial skills i have been taking a free online course in finance from Yale (ECON 252: Financial Market. While i cant claim to rub shoulders with New Haven’s elite, i can get pretty close to what they are learning and all for free.
Overall, I’ve been very impressed. The majority of this course i’ve been able to follow on my ipod without needing to do the heavy course reading. I especially, like class #9, the guest lecture by David Swensen. Basically, it’s a course on “What Wall Street Does Not Want You Know”:
- David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer and manager of the University’s endowment, discusses the tactics and tools that Yale and other endowments use to create long-term, positive investment returns. He emphasizes the importance of asset allocation and diversification and the limited effects of market timing and security selection. Also, the extraordinary returns of hedge funds, one of the more recent phenomena of portfolio management, should be looked at closely, with an eye for survivorship and back-fill biases.
There are 2 main formats by which you can take the course, mp3 download or video. The transcripts of the lecture are also available if you really want to dig deep. Click here for the download page for the Yale finance course.
This has started me on a crusade to back fill my education with courses and content that have real relevance to me to day. I like being able to take a course and especially being able to apply it to my business.
Here’s a course on pricing from the Wharton School, liked:
How much should you charge? Why micro pricing pays off
The big challenge with the free online educational content is plowing through the vast volumes of content and finding what is of interest (believe me, there is something there for everyone and everything). One way to do this is to use some targeted search engines (see below). There are a bunch more tactics but that is a blog post in itself.
- ocwsearch.com – indexing OpenCourseWare material from MIT. More universities will be added soon.
- ocwfinder.org - OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares
- www.ocwconsortium – index currently contains 2,970 courses from 37 sources and 6 languages
- oedb.org – You’ll find digital archives, a variety of courses, Podcasts, videos and sometimes a mix of everything you can imagine.
Let me know if you want some specific recommendation for business, entrepreneurial or finance courses, I’ve done a lot of digging around or if you would like more posts on this subject also let me know (make a post below).
