A quick update: Last year, we told you about Corey Olsen, an English Professor at Washington College, who started publishing online lectures on the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. We initially featured his lecture series on The Hobbit. Now “The Tolkien Professor,” as Olsen is otherwise known, presents a series of online courses on The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Lord of the Rings I: The Road Goes Ever On — iTunesU
Lord of the Rings II: The Two Towers — iTunesU — Web
Lord of the Rings III: Return of the King - iTunes U — Web
The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 100 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.
Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London
Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.
An émigré from Nazi Germany, Hans Bethe joined Cornell’s physics department back in 1935. There, he built a remarkable career for himself. A nuclear physicist, Bethe made key contributions to the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, he brought stellar young physicists like Richard Feynman from Los Alamos to Ithaca and turned Cornell’s physics department into a top-notch program. In 1967, he won the Nobel Prize for “his groundbreaking work on the theory of energy production in stars.”
As a tribute to Bethe, Cornell now hosts a web site called Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple, where you can watch three lectures presented by Bethe in 1999. They’re a little different from the usual lectures you encounter online. In these videos, Bethe is 93 years old, older than your average prof. And he presents the lectures not in a Cornell classroom, but at the Kendal of Ithaca retirement community, which gives them a certain charm. You can watch them here:
Lecture 1: Here Bethe “introduces quantum theory as ‘the most important discovery of the twentieth century’ and shows that quantum theory gave us ‘understanding and technology.’ He cites computers as a dramatic realization of applied quantum physics.”
Lecture 2: “By the 1920s, physicists were driving to synthesize early quantum ideas into a consistent theory. In Lecture 2, Professor Bethe relates the exciting theoretical and experimental breakthroughs that led to modern quantum mechanics.”
Lecture 3: In the last lecture, “Professor Bethe recalls work on the interpretation of the wave function, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle. He shows how quantum theory forced discussion of issues such as determinism, physical observables, and action-at-a-distance.”
FYI: Apple officially released iOS7, the latest operating system for the iPhone and iPad, on September 18. Almost simultaneously, Stanford began offering a course teaching students how to design apps in the new environment. Although the course is still in progress, the initial video lectures are now available online, you guessed it, on iTunesU.
They may be a little late to the MOOC party, but two newly-launched European open course platforms might still be able to carve out a niche.
Coursera and edX, the two main players in the US at this point, have been up and running for almost 18 months. And although both ventures have a long list of international partners, the rising cost of higher education is building interest in MOOCs in Europe and the UK. The founders of new European platforms — Future Learn in the UK, and iversity in Germany — are betting they can still make headway in an increasingly crowded market.
A subsidiary of the British Open University, Future Learn is in its beta stage, but it’s already boasting partnerships with universities across Britain, Ireland, and Australia. And come this November, it will be rolling out courses across multiple disciplines. Take for example:
Meanwhile Berlin-based startup iversity recently relaunched itself as a MOOC platform. This week, iversity’s first six courses begin. Four are in German and two are in English: Contemporary Architecture and Dark Matter in Galaxies. A total of 115,000 students are currently enrolled.
Future Learn and iversity both seem to be aimed at audiences who are relatively new to the MOOC concept. Both sites take care to explain what MOOCs are in very simple terms—which may be a smart strategy for businesses setting out to convince Europe and Britain that the MOOC trend is for real.
You can find all courses by Future Learn and iversity listed in our big collection of 600+ MOOCs from Top Universities.
Updated: Love and longing, hope and fear — these threads run throughout all literature, whether we’re talking about the great ancient epics, or contemporary novels written in the East or the West. That’s the main premise of Invitation to World Literature, a multimedia program organized by David Damrosch (Harvard University), and made with the backing of WGBH and Annenberg Media.
The program features 13 half-hour videos, which move from The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2500 BCE) through García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude(1967). And, collectively, these videos highlight over 100+ writers, scholars, artists, and performers with a personal connection to world literature. Philip Glass, Francine Prose, Harold Ramis, Robert Thurman, Kwame Anthony Appiah — they all make an appearance.
Permanently housed in the Literature section of our collection of 1,300 Free Online Courses, Invitation to World Literature features the following lectures:
Here’s an update to our original 2011 post: The social theorist and geographer David Harvey has produced a free online course where he gives a close reading of Karl Marx’s Capital (1867). Often considered to be Marx’s masterpiece, Capital is where he elaborated a critique of capitalism and laid the groundwork for an ideology that took the 20th century by storm. Harvey has taught courses on Capital for over 40 years, both in universities (Johns Hopkins and CUNY) and in the community as well. Now his 26 lecture course is freely available on the web. You can watch the first lecture above. (It’s preceded by an introductory, six-minute interview.) The rest of the lectures can be accessed via Harvey’s web site, YouTube, iTunes, and the Economics section of our collection of Free Online Courses.
Marking a new phase of the project, Professor Harvey is now looking for volunteers to help translate his lectures into 36 languages. If you speak English and languages like Urdu, Arabic or Italian (just to list a few), you can start helping with translations here.
Also note that Harvey published A Companion to Marx’s Capitalin 2010. It’s something you’ll want read along with the lectures.
The School of Open is offering its second round of free, facilitated, online courses. Through August 4, you can sign up for 7 courses on open science, collaborative workshop design, open educational resources, copyright for educators, Wikipedia, CC licenses, and more. Courses will start after the first week of August and run for 3 to 7 weeks, depending on the course topic and organizer. All courses will offer badges for recognition of skills and/or course completion as part of P2PU’s badges pilot. Here’s a list of the upcoming courses, all of which have been added to our comprehensive list of MOOCs.
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