Going to a top quality university can be difficult for a number of reasons, such as the stringent acceptance policies typically employed by them, and the massive fees you need to pay for attendance, but a recent trend among many of the best universities from around the world is to offer courses, for free, to people around the world.

A number of the most famous colleges and universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, and more, offer online learning courses, Massive Open Online Courses, MOOC’s, where you get access to a wealth of learning material, from lectures, to textbooks. While you don’t get the face to face management a proper student at one of these universities would gain by attending, you can still get a lot of value from these resources.

This trend also extends beyond simply online learning opportunities as well, such as a recent plan announced by Stanford to tour their tech-entrepreneurship course around the world, starting with London. In fact, many schools have these kind of micro-campuses where they are able to offer unique opportunities people aiming to gain a specific set of skills.