All For Free and Free For All

From Ridley:


I'm going to make the leap here, and assume readers of Naked Authors are interested in writing. Maybe some of you are even interested in extended education. Call me naïve, but I wasn't aware that free university level courses existed all over the Internet. I had heard about the sites that offer degrees online often at exaggerated fees, but not that you could get high-quality Ivy League level education for free over websites. Freedom rings.

I'm no big fan of spam. It is in fact one of those things we tolerate by having e-mail and being on the Internet. I avoid opening anything that looks like spam, because I know the spammers have ways to determine if you even click on their e-mails. If you do, your e-mail address then gets put on the master list, that list gets sold around the world, and your spam increases exponentially. Who wants that?

So when the subject line offers enhancement, or size, or has the word "woman" in it, I send it straight to the trash. But there this morning, nagging at me from my Junk Mail, was the subject line that included university course. And how could I resist? First, I tried to establish that the sender was legitimate. Then I dared click through, and lo and behold, free university courses even from sites like M.I.T. online. As someone who just spent a year teaching a university course (in China), I was particularly interested because these courses had to do with literature, creative writing, and writing in general. I clicked through on a few of them, and ended up reading from a list of about 40 very interesting university courses, none of which get you any college credit, nor do you get access to the university's faculty, but there for your taking, is the full academic course. Amazing! So here, readers of the Naked Authors Blog, are university courses in a subject matter that may be dear to your heart, all for free. If you happen to have about 80 hours of free time, have at it.