Essentially...no experience. I want to learn about them without taking a college course.
Well, you don't have to take a college course but it would be well worth sitting down with a professional to discuss a few things before getting too involved. I'm sure that Bubba could give you a good overview but just to get the ball rolling I'll point to one fairly popular fund to give you some fundamentals -
https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/316345206
The link above is to the summary page for a popular mutual fund. I'd recommend clicking the "composition" tab. The information on that tab will tell you what economic sectors are targeted by this fund. As you can see, roughly half of the assets in this fund are invested in financial, IT and health care products. A little farther down the page you can get an idea of what some of those particular products are (in this case it's Apple, FNMA mortgages, Pfizer, etc.).
The fund itself is continually managed by selling and buying various products in these sectors. If, for example, Apple stock went to $700/shr the managers might sell a bunch of that stock and buy something else. They would do this because as the stock value of Apple increases it creates more and more risk in the fund as a whole (you know the old adage about putting all of ones eggs in one basket). As these transactions occur over the course of a year the investors in this fund receive capital gains and dividends which are all netted together and reported in bulk.
A little farther down the page you will see the allocation of fund assets between equities, bonds and other stuff. "Equities" generally means stock and stock means ownership of a percentage of a given company. "Bonds" generally mean loans and people who own bonds get paid interest on money they have loaned to a business. "Other" could be lots of different things including cash, commodities, insurance contracts, etc.
In a nutshell, if you buy shares of this mutual fund you will own a small portion of all the assets in this fund.
If you look at the "summary" tab you will see that this fund has grown in value at a rate of 8.45% over the past 10 years and is up just over 8% so far this year. Buying one share of this fund currently costs $21.73 and there is a minimum investment of $2500 to buy into this fund. The fund pays a management fee of .6% of net asset value per year. In general, a fund such as this tends to grow pretty well without a whole lot of risk.
This summary is VERY generic but should give you a decent idea of what a mutual fund is and how one works without melting your brain with a whole lot of technical information.