An Ivy League education comes with a lot of caché and costs a lot of cash. But for just a bit of computer cache, you can take some Ivy League classes without investing anything more than your time. 

The eight institutions that comprise the Ivy League join lots of other places of higher education in offering some of their courses online and frequently for free. Though they are not for credit, they can enrich your life in lots of ways. Taking an online course doesn’t have any of the pressure that being in school has. There are no deadlines for papers, no tests you forgot were today. Instead, you can focus on actually absorbing the material. When there is coursework such as readings or quizzes, it's completely optional. So you can choose to get involved with some side projects or just enjoy the lectures.

Finding these classes takes a little work, though. Apple’s iTunes U once had half a million classes available for free, but it shut the service down last year. (There is an archive online.)  Now there’s a smattering of classes available on the sites of individual schools and other platforms like edX and Coursera. We’ve put together some of the more interesting offerings below. (Be sure to check out our full roundup of the best online learning services as well.)

More Human Than Human at Brown University

Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans: Exploring Humanity Through Literature (edX)
This Brown class asks us to consider what makes us human by examining what’s not: robots, androids, and aliens. Students will create an avatar along the way of this unusual literary journey. The class takes about three weeks and is archived so you can start it at any time. (Take the course.)

All Dalai'd Up at Columbia University

Indian & Tibetan River of Buddhism (edX)
This class from Professor Robert Thurman is perennially packed at Columbia. Thurman was the first American Buddhist monk and was ordained by the Dalai Lama. (He’s also Uma Thurman’s dad.) This class covers the history and philosophy of Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia. Here you can get a seat right in front and take your time in completing the approximately 12-week class. (Take the course.)

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Not long ago, I tackled the long-overdue tech project of cleaning out my computer’s “Pictures” folder. It had grown ever more unwieldy after years of backing up my phone’s photos and dumping the contents of my DSLR’s memory cards, so I decided it was finally time to eliminate duplicate photos, blurry shots, useless screengrabs, and other assorted detritus. That allowed me to sort the remaining contents into albums without much hassle.

Why did my Pictures folder get so messy? Mostly, I blame Google Photos, which makes searching through old pictures so easy that I was content to just ignore my hard drive’s backup folder, knowing that it existed mainly for safekeeping.

But now that unlimited Google Photos has gone away, I decided it was time to stop being complacent. Even if I keep using the service (at the cost of another cloud storage subscription), I like the idea of having a backup plan.

Still, I winced at the thought of sorting through thousands of old photos one-by-one. What I really needed was a way to eliminate similar-looking photos in bulk and winnow my remaining library down to a much more manageable size. Fortunately, I found exactly what I was looking for with a free duplicate photo cleaner for Windows called AllDup.

AllDup for Windows

Unlike most of the results that appear when you search the web for duplicate photo removers, AllDup has no ads, in-app purchases, or usage limitations. And while it’s a little ungainly to set up, the payoff is in all the ways it lets you customize your duplicate file searches.

As a business owner, you likely understand the importance of a quality online presence. Too often brands suffer due to a poorly made website, ridden with SEO mistakes. Small business SEO is the determining factor in terms of consumer engagement and web visibility. As you work to build your brand and market your business, it is imperative that you set your website up for success through effective SEO practices. We have compiled a list of the top 10 most common SEO mistakes that businesses make on their website to get you started. 

10 Common SEO Mistakes on Your Website

1. Not Prioritizing Google My Business

Of the 167 billion Google searches conducted annually, the average business profile receives only 1,260 of these views. Of the 1,260 views, only 59 actions typically result. This meager percentage is a grim reality for most businesses registered on Google. Fortunately, as a business owner, increasing your visibility and engagement is largely in your power. 

Google places utmost importance on “near me” searches, and consequently prioritizes business listings with adequate geolocation information. Ensure that your business profile contains specific contact information, up-to-date hours, relevant photos, and promptly answered questions. All of these factors will consistently increase your brand visibility on the search engine. 

In Mashable’s new three-part episode of our series on the digital age's dark side, Kernel Panic, we explore a startlingly advanced computer network developed in Salvador Allende's Chile of the 1970s. Called Project Cybersyn, the network was a centerpiece of Allende's effort to modernize the Chilean economy. It was developed in parallel with the American networks that would become the internet, at a moment in time in which President Nixon was trying to undermine the Chilean economy and overthrow Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist leader in Latin America.

Cybersyn, designed by a farthinking British theorist named Stafford Beer and run by a cadre of young revolutionary programmers, was an astonishing success. Using little more than old telephone wires and mothballed pre-war machinery, the Chilean program managed to build out a real-time data stream very much like the social media newsfeed of today, watching and monitoring the country's industry from a retro-futuristic control room in the capital.

For two years, the programmers used Cybersyn to battle strikes and attempted coups until finally, in September of 1973, Allende was overthrown by a military junta led by Augusto Pinochet. The dream of a stable, modernized Chile died with Allende, and so did the potential for a second internet, built in parallel and evolved under a totally different system of information sharing.

Mashable speaks to Fernando Flores who served under Allende as finance minister before spending three years in prison under Pinochet, as well as Raul Espejo, operational director of Project Cybersyn, and the family of Stafford Beer to take you inside the dream and disappointment of Project Cybersyn.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3