If learning is more important to you than earning a university degree, then YouTube EDU might be for you. In March the popular video-sharing website launched a special wing where universities and colleges have uploaded thousands of online courses that are free, but also not for credit. Among the more than 100 institutions of higher education using the new YouTube portal are some of the most respected in the country, including MIT, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. Classes range in subjects from liberal arts to vocational programs like dentistry. The University of Michigan’s School of Dentistry alone offers more than 400 videos on YouTube. The Sloan Consortium estimated last year that almost 4 million students in the United States took online courses in 2007, which represented a 12% increase over 2006.