Long ago, long before MIT hatched plans for its OpenCourseWare initiative and later edX, the university taped a lecture series covering the equivalent of a freshman-level calculus course. Released in 1970, the introductory class taught by Herbert Gross was suited for any student brushing up on his/her calculus, or learning the subject for the first time. MIT has now revived the lecture series, called “Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus,” along with two more advanced courses. Although times have changed, calculus remains the same. And you’ll still find the series to be quite handy.
This week, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project launched OCW Scholar, a new series of courses “designed for independent learners who have few additional resources available to them.” To date, MIT has given students access to isolated materials from MIT courses. Now, with this new initiative, lifelong learners can work with a more rounded set of resources. OWC Scholar takes video lectures, homework problems, problem solving videos, simulations, readings, etc., and stitches them into a structured curriculum. Perfect for the self-disciplined student.
Below we have listed the first five courses in the OWC Scholar collection. (They’re entirely free.) Fast forward three years and you will find 20 courses online, says MIT. All will be added to our big list of Free Online Courses.
Last week, the launch of Stanford Engineering Everywhere, featuring 10 free computer science and engineering courses, got no shortage of buzz on the net. This led me to think, why not highlight other major collections of free university courses/resources. As you’ll see, each collection offers countless hours of free, high quality content. Download the audio and video to your iPod or computer, and you can get lost here for days, weeks, even months. A perfect way to distract yourself on the cheap during the recession. For many more free courses, be sure to see our larger collection of Free Courses, which now includes over 250 free classes from leading universities.
1.UC Berkeley — Stanford’s neighbor to the north makes available a large number of courses online. The collection features lectures taken directly from the undergraduate classroom. And they can be accessed through multiple means — that is, through the web/rss feed, through Berkeley’s iTunesU site, and via YouTube. Overall, this is probably the deepest collection of free academic content out there. And here you’ll find one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents, taught by Richard Muller. You can download the course in audio (iTunes — Feed — MP3s) or watch it in video here.
2.Yale — Last fall, Yale launched an open course initiative known as Open Yale Courses. The university initially came out of the gate with seven courses, and it plans to release another eight this fall. As you will see, Yale’s project is high-touch. Each course features a syllabus, reading assignments, class notes, and polished lectures, which, when taken together, contribute to a well-rounded learning experience. The lectures can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the courses to be downloaded fairly easily, which means that you can put the lectures onto an mp3 player, even if you’re only a little tech savvy. Here’s a list of the course titles that you will find: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Modern Poetry, Death, Fundamentals of Physics, Introduction to Political Philosophy, Introduction to Psychology, and Introduction to the Old Testament.
3. MIT — By now, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project is no secret. Leading the open course charge, MIT has put online materials from 1,800 courses, including syllabi, reading lists, course notes, assignments, etc. If there was a downside to the MIT initiative, it was that it originally lacked audio and video lectures. These days, however, MIT has started to fill that gap by adding audio and video components to a number of courses, including Walter Lewin’s very popular and publicized course, Classical Mechanics. Download the course lectures in video via iTunes or in various formats here.
We’ve integrated all of these courses into our own meta list of Free Courses from leading universities. It now includes roughly 250 courses, and we’d encourage you to bookmark the page and use it often. Enjoy.
For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60–80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of the challenges I have to deal with is how to address novels, films, television shows, video games and more as part of the same “list.” How does one put these things together? How can a video game be read as a text alongside Gravity’s Rainbow or Brave New World?
One way to approach this question is to include the work of literary and cultural critics who are already looking at new and traditional media side by side. Following that line, I try to keep up with the academic blog Grand Text Auto, which covers “computer narrative, games, poetry and art.” One of its contributors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is working on a book about digital fictions and computer games that looks perfect for my Orals list—and he’s publishing it, chapter by chapter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.
All fine so far—I could list it as “forthcoming” and direct my professors to the link. But what happens when I start commenting on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowledge that this “text” will most likely change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list signify a draft of the book, the blog and its comments, or the experience of reading and writing into the MS myself (including, perhaps, responses from the author)?
I find the dilemma particularly interesting because it touches on a central conflict in humanities scholarship. Are we passive observers of the literary scene or active participants in it? It’s a rare academic critic who thinks of calling up a poet to ask her what she meant in a particular line, but that’s exactly the kind of connection that our hyper-conscious, digitally mediated world offers up.
P.S. After all of this hand-wringing, it’s obvious I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!
The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling now comes with a lot of cool features: mesh technology so a group of students can share one wifi connection; low power consumption and the ability to recharge batteries with solar cells or even a hand crank; a linux operating system and open source software.
I suspect that last feature is causing the biggest problem for Intel. According to the Times, company sales reps actually tried to persuade several countries to ditch the OLPC in favor of a more expensive machine running Microsoft Windows. I don’t know about you but I have a hard time imagining disadvantaged Peruvian first-graders keeping up with their security updates, troubleshooting the less-than-stellar Windows wifi utility or shelling out for that upgrade to Vista.
Maybe those kids need other things more than they need laptops, but it can’t hurt. In any case it’s hard to believe how badly Intel managed this saga in terms of public relations. Think of the children, guys!
During a week when university podcasts received widespread attention (thanks to a very popular article in the NY Times), we’ve kept a close eye on the high-ranking podcasts on iTunesU. Quite consistently, one podcast — How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps? — has ranked at the top. It currently sits in the #2 position, right behind What is Existentialism?.
The Hannibal lecture was presented at Stanford by Patrick Hunt, an archaeologist who recently wrote Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History (see related post) and whose long term project is to figure out how the great military leader crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with his large army, which included dozens of war elephants. I had a chance to catch up with Patrick and ask him why, over 2,000 years later, the adventures of Hannibal still manage to capture our imagination. Here is what he had to say:
“Here are some reasons I think the Hannibal topic is mesmerizing. First, the logistics of moving a large army — at least 25,000 surviving soldiers — over sometimes terrifying mountain barriers is very daunting and immensely challenging. Second, this is exponentially compounded by the fact that even with able scouts the increasingly steep terrain and bad weather en route to the summit were threateningly unfamiliar to the vast majority of Hannibal’s army in this early winter of 218 BCE. Even in summer, the weather can be harsh and wildly unpredictable. In winter, it can be that much worse. Third, there were Celtic tribes to contend with, who would roll boulders down on troops and ambush them from (more…)
Here’s a quick fyi on two initiatives announced for high school students this past week:
For six years, MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative has done a great job bringing free educational materials to adult learners worldwide. (More on the initiative here.) Now, it has launched a section of its website devoted to high school students and teachers. Here, you’ll find a series of “MIT introductory courses” within 11 major areas of study (e.g. Engineering, Foreign Languages, Math, etc.). Plus, you can access information that supplements AP Biology, Physics and Calculus courses. This is a trove of material that the ambitious student will certainly want to explore.
Next, Google announced its first open source contest for pre-university students. Called the “Google Highly Open Participation Contest” (a bit of a mouthful), it’s intended to “help introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development and to encourage young people through opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.” For more information you can click here and here.
MIT has released a new search engine that draws on speech recognition technology and lets users search MIT audio & video lectures by keyword. For example, if you type “NASA” into the search box, the search results will include all of the instances where a speaker utters the word NASA in a recorded lecture. (You can get more background information on the new search engine here.)
Now, what’s nice about using this example is that a “NASA” search will bring you to an intriguing presentation by Sylvia Nasar. (Click here and type “NASA” or “Sylvia.”) She’s the author of the bestelling book, A Beautiful Mind, which offers a biographical account of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash and his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia. The book was turned into an Academy Award-winning film, and here you can find Nasar delivering a lecture at MIT called “A Beautiful Mind: Genius, Madness, Reawakening.” She’s a very able speaker and tells a good story. Have a look. (You can also access Nasar’s talk here.)
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