“No Regrets” Education

January 30th, 2012
Galina · Staff Recommendations

According to Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, the top regret experienced by most people in their lives is their education (followed by issues related to their careers, romance, and parenting). However, just because you regret your choice of education, that doesn’t mean that, you’re stuck for the rest of your life. While having a piece of paper with a degree is important, there’s no reason to stop learning, and there are more resources for learning than ever before.

The public library has always been a place that people turn to when they are seeking information. We have the resources that allow people to teach themselves what they need to know to fulfill their intellectual curiosity and improve their lives.

Now, here is why having regrets can be a good thing – if you choose to acknowledge your regret in not going to school and you use that to motivate yourself, then that regret could change your life for the better.

Here, at the library, we can help you once you make the decision to use your regret to fuel your desire to obtain more knowledge.

The Edupunks’ Guide: How to Write a Personal Learning Plan teaches you how to write a personal learning plan, how to teach yourself online, how to build your personal learning network, 7 ways to get college credit without taking a college course, etc. Free eBook download.

Open Culture: 400 Free Online Courses from Top Universities is a listing of free online audio and video courses from different sources broken down into broad subject areas.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium provides resources and information on Open Courseware materials, and offers a useful search tool to locate one of 6,384 courses from 64 sources and 12 languages.

YouTube EDU brings learners and educators together in a global video classroom.

TED Talks shares the best ideas from the TED Conference with the world, for free. More than 900 TED Talks are now available.

The Floating University students can receive Ivy League instruction at community college prices and choose from an online menu of courses taught by famous professors.

Free with your library card:

LearningExpressLibrary – A comprehensive, interactive online learning platform of practice tests and tutorial course series.

Foreign Language Study Audio Books – Downloadable audio books: beginners to advance.

E-Books: Business and Career -Instant access. Large selection. All formats available for PC, Mac, eBook readers and other mobile devices.