Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Free Courses Online

#1 UC Berkeley

Ranked as the #1 public school in the United States, Berkeley offers podcasts and webcasts of amazing professors lecturing. Each course has an RSS feed so you can track each new lecture. For printable assignments and notes you can check the professors homepage, which is usually given in the first lecture or google his name. Even though the notes, homework and tests are not directly printed in the berkeley website, as they are in MIT and other courseware sites, it's not a problem to find them. I personally tried to use it for John Wawrzynek's machine structures class and the nutrition courses.

Visit: Berkeley Webcasts
Visit: Berkeley RSS Feeds
Visit: UC Berkeley on Google Video

Getting The Most From Berkeley Webcasts

Berkeley Videos are in .rm format and real player can be a pain. It asks you to register real player, spawns on startup. Instead, download a free program called media player classic with the real alternative plugin. Media player classic is fully featured and much easier on the computers memory. The real alternative plugin download seems to come with an older version of media player classic, so updating media classic is optional.

Download: Real Alternative Plugin
Download: Media Player Classic For Windows XP/2000
Download: Media Player Classic For Windows 98/ME

#2 MIT Open Courseware

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is ranked 7th nationally in the United States. Many of the courses do not have video lectures. Instead, they have notes in PDF format along with tests and homework.

Visit: MIT OpenCourseware Course Listings
Visit: MIT OpenCourseware Online Textbooks
Visit: MIT Courses With Video Lectures
Visit: MITWorld Public Videos
Visit: MIT Pocast: ZigZag

Getting the Most Out of MIT OCW

Since MIT OCW is heavily based on opening PDF files it's recommended you download FoxIt Reader, a freeware PDF reader that's many times faster than the bulky and slow adobe acrobat. Also Ghost Script in combination with GSView is able to read pdfs, and post scripts files.

Download: Foxit Reader

#3 Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative

Carnegie Mellon is a private research university ranked equal with Berkeley. Though registration is not required they have a registered user mode that allows you to keep track of your scores and progress. Currently 11 courses are offered. The courses are basically ebooks in a frame-based easy to use navigation system with an occasional powerful interactive Java Applet for practice and testing.

Visit: Carnegie Mellon OLI

#4 Utah State OpenCourseWare

Utah State has a very familiar structure as MIT OCW with large available course listing.

Visit: Utah State Course Listings

#5 Tufts OpenCourseWare

Tufts University in Massachusetts has a very familiar structure as MIT OCW with large available course listing.

Visit: Utah State Course Listings

#6 Openlearn

European site called Open University's OpenLearn supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Contains many online course and a different style content management system. I was unable to find anything interactive or any streaming media, though it does have forums for each course. Appears to function mostly as a large educational ebook library.

Visit: OpenLearn

2 #7 JHSPH OCW

Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health offers health based lecture notes and assigments. You'll find the JHSPH OCW website uses the same familiar navigation structure as MIT OCW. The notes are formatted much more cleanly but I haven't seen exams, and their search bar seems to be broken.

Visit: JHSPH OCW Course Listings
Visit: Johns Hopkins University Podcasts

#8 Connexions

CNX.org is an open-content library of course materials developed by Rice University. It has a huge database of content which is very useful for people who know what they're looking for. It does have ebook style higher level courses courses you can choose from.

Visit: Connexions
Visit: Connexions Course List

#9 Sophia

Initiative is led by Foothill College which contains 8 free courses.

Visit: Sofia

#10 University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering

Contains posted lectures and classnotes. Some of the courses even contain video lectures.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/course-webs.html

Notre Dame OpenCourseware

Just found out about this one.

http://ocw.nd.edu/

Wikiversity

From the creators of wikipedia, Wikiversity describes itself as being a community seeking to create and use learning materials and activities. Wikibooks is also incredibly powerful already containing everything from a detailed guide to learning French to Organic Chemistry and Nanotechnology.

Visit: Wikiversity
Visit: Wikibooks

Archive.org Education

Contains 1354 educational resources at the time of posting.

Visit: Archive.org Education

Honorable Mention: Peoi.org

Visit: Peoi.org

Barnes and Nobles University

Free online courses given as long as you buy the required reading material. Unfortunately barnes and nobles university is now barnes and nobles book club.

More University Video Sites

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/
http://graduateschool.paristech.org/?langue=EN
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/
http://mitworld.mit.edu/
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/
http://www.law.duke.edu/webcast/index.html
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/multimedia/video_mm.html
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/sci/sls.html#Presentations
http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/multimedia/videoarchive.html
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/webcasts/
http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Default
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/audiovideo.html
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/archive.htm
http://www.oid.ucla.edu/Webcast/
http://www.yale.edu/yale300/democracy/mediatranscripts.htm
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/video.jsp



http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/
Jimmy Ruska
http://freevideolectures.com/

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