Free for All: An Unlikely Intro to Open Access Courses

If you've looked into distance learning, perhaps you have come across the pleasingly bovine acronym MOOC – or, Massive Open Online Course. The principle of MOOCs is to make available the raw materials you'd need to study, say, game theory, or Scandinavian film and television, or y'know, equine nutrition, free to access by anyone, anywhere, via the internet. Hype intensified a couple of years ago, as bigger numbers of high-profile educational institutions began signing up. Some of the providers are initiatives of or at least closely connected to those big hitters themselves – the founding partners of edX.org are MIT and Harvard, while Coursera was set up by two science professors from Stanford. Others, such as P2PU (Peer to Peer University), are driven not by traditional collegiate bodies but function as a network of experts/practitioners creating courses of their own.

If this sounds too good to be true, maybe it is. Interaction with professors or your fellow students is limited; you don't have access to the physical facilities of an institution. Completion of the course doesn't usually accrue university credits – although in most cases you will receive a 'statement of accomplishment' – and if you want a properly authenticating certificate, providers may require a fee. Don't let any of this put you off, though – the important thing is that there is a totally nuts amount of stuff out there to discover.

If you're anything like most humans you'll probably sign up to 21 different programmes and drop all of them after the first webinar – but for those with some determination, here are just five things you could do:

1. Plot a space mission and invent your own planetary system in Imagining Other Earths (Princeton University via coursera.org, starts September). Consider also, 'Dino 101', which is ABOUT DINOSAURS (from the University of Alberta).

2. Understand the city as a human-made 'organism' to be able to plan a better life for our rapidly growing urban populations, in Future Cities – delivered by tutors affiliated with ETH Zurich through edX.org (starts September). Or, y'know, receive an Introduction to Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's MIT for short.

3. Examine the power of lovely Mario Götze – sorry, football – and its influences on everything in Football: More Than a Game (the University of Edinburgh via FutureLearn.com, starts 20 Oct). Other important offerings from FutureLearn include How to Read Your Boss and uh, Looking After Your Liver.

4. Make your own version of the bane of everyone's life, (mobile app game) 2048 – or learn how to track and, indeed, capture a runaway robot – through udacity.com, which boasts relationships with various Silicon Valley types including Google and Facebook.

5. Work on your mandolin technique at worldmentoringacademy.com.