Go to college: stay home

Get smarter. Save money. Avoid traffic, germs and chit chat. Learn cool stuff from professors and lecturers at a well-known university. Get free reading materials. Discuss what you are learning with fellow students, without dealing with noisy environments and eye contact. Drop in and drop out of classes without dealing with a registrar or the financial aid office.

Does education get any better than that?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology free online courses.

MIT courses available in video form online, also free.

The catch is that you can't get credit for these classes and so you can't exactly use them toward getting a degree, but one might use them as a warm up for a for-credit college class, and one might be able to use the information profitably even if one didn't get college-credits for learning the information. MIT offers a place for the online students to discuss the materials amongst themselves, apart from the regular matriculated students. Sometimes a textbook must be purchased, but some of the classes provide reading materials, the rough equivalent of a textbook. Some professors in real-world classes are loathe to require textbooks and so require students to read information from their computers or print the information from their computers. The whole textbook thing can be breathtakingly expensive. Fewer textbook expenses is good.

Principals of Chemical Science looks like an intro to chemistry course. It might even be a "chemistry for non-chemistry majors" kind of course without the heavy duty math. Perfect for those of you who are just dying to figure out the basics of what a redox reaction is, but don't really want to get a PhD level of understanding. That class has videos of lectures.

Introduction to Psychology might be interesting.

Neuroscience and Behavior, might also be interesting, the video recordings from this course are from 2003 so some of the information could be out of date, since so many discoveries are occurring in neuroscience.


Brain Structure and it's Origins from Spring of 2005.


Genomic Medicine from Spring 2004

There are dozens of psychology courses, but most don't have online video available.

Developmental Neurobiology looks good.

Traditional Chinese Literature: Poetry, Fiction and Drama,

The Making of Russia in the Worlds of Byzantium, Mongolia, and Europe,

Communicating in Cyberspace.


Other than MIT there are collections of free online lectures in podcast form (download mp3's). Sometimes the professors are pointing to diagrams and discussing chapter 10 of a particular textbook, but one can still get some information from the lecture.

Free lectures from courses at UC Berkeley, Webcast Berkeley.

Clinical Psychology: become a better armchair diagnostician thanks to courses from UC Berkeley.

Social Psychology: UC Berkeley. Social Psychology is so interesting. A person could write a book on the social psychology principals demonstrated by Internet support groups for parents of autistic children from 2000 to 2007.

Psych 101, Research and Data Analysis in Psychology. Highly recommended for understanding most autism related research papers.

Ooooh, fun. Introduction to Statistics: UC Berkeley.

Anatomy and Physiology: understand what your doctor means when he says systolic or alvioli from Southwest Technical College.

General Biology: UC Berkeley. Enzymes, DNA, homeostasis and the nervous system for starters. Hot topics for readers of autism science.

General Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: UC Berkeley, again. More specific stuff about DNA and RNA and what is going on at that famed "cellular level."

From York College, City University New York. (CUNY)

Human Development I: Infancy/Childhood.

History of Psychology: sounds interesting.

Autism Diva hasn't looked to see how many other universities offer openly accessible course material or podcasts of their lectures, but there are lots of universities that have a few things like illustrations and basic explanations of stuff on their websites.

iTunes has some lectures from various UC Davis MIND Institute lectures, some that the original audiences had to pay to hear. It's possible that other universities have stuff for free on iTunes.


There are many reasons why online courses and lectures are a good choice for autism spectrum people. There could be a 10 year old homeschooled autism spectrum kid who is ready for college math, there could be another 10 year old autism spectrum kid who really wants to learn about some arcane topic (Topics in History: Medieval Latvia) that he or she is just not going get the information from grade school. Even 60 year old autistics tend to be impassioned information seekers, and even 60 year old autistics can't always cope with the (sometimes hideous) social demands of the college milieu. The issue of expense can be huge for autistic people, but even autistic people with little money may have access to a computer with Internet access at a public place like a blissfully quiet library. In real-life university courses you can't hit the pause button in a real lecture, you can't always turn up the volume on what the teacher is saying and frequently there is chatter from fellow students that is very distracting.

You can't take a week off and expect to pick up where you left off, either. In the quarter system information comes at students rapidly. The semester system leaves a tiny bit more breathing room. Getting sick or showing up late for particular days can be disastrous to one's grade, missing a week could be nearly catastrophic, especially for someone who can't advocate well for his or her needs and really can't pick up a phone and ask a classmate for information on critical information missed in that week. If one had a feeling for what was covered in an Intro to Biology course before one began taking a real-world Intro to Biology course, one might be able to cope with the onslaught of information a bit better.

Things like the lab portion of a class, like the one where Autism Diva had to learn about brain anatomy by dissecting sheep brains (and eyes), that's not going to be the same experience in an online course, but Autism Diva was thinking she would have learned better if she could have dissected that sheep brain at home (but that's not really possible with formaldehyde preserved brains), it's probably not a good idea to have a real chemistry lab at home, either. Another downside of online courses would be that the pressure to complete assignments that is helpful motivation in real-world classes and in paid-for online classes is missing. Also, one gets essays corrected in a real course, that wouldn't be available in an online course, though the MIT courses do have tests and apparently they provide the answers for self-correction.

Not everyone needs a college degree. Not all ASD kids should be told that they will go to college or need to go to college. Not everyone needs to know what Bernoulli's equation is, but if they do, maybe they don't need to go to college to get that information. Some people desperately would like to go to a college but can't for many different reasons. If a person has Internet access, and maybe the ability to print from the computer (or get the computer to read aloud what is on the screen) they can get loads of cool information, the same that university students are getting in some cases, and for free.



Autism Diva
remote learner