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.
Hardly a day goes by where I’m not doing one of two things — listening to an audio book from Audible.com, or listening to a lecture from The Great Courses (formerly known as The Teaching Company). So, I was naturally pleased when the two companies announced a partnership yesterday. From now on, Audible subscribers can download courses/lectures from The Great Courses, and they’re pretty cheap. For example, members of Audible’s Gold plan can purchase a polished 36-hour course, such as How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, for roughly $15. Not bad, especially considering that it would cost exponentially more to buy it directly through the Great Courses’ web site. If you’ve never tried out Audible or The Great Courses, then you may want to sign up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial. It will let you download any one course for free. NB: Audible is an Amazon.com subsidiary, and we’re a member of their affiliate program.
Almost daily, readers write us and ask for courses that can deepen their professional education. Some want to learn new tech skills. Others want to bone up on statistics and calculus. And still others want to learn about project management. We decided to address this by creating a new collection of Free Online Business Courses. So far, we’ve compiled a list of 145 business-oriented courses and related resources. Some courses come from leading universities. Others come from government, non-profits and the occasional MOOC provider. The list is fairly rich. But we will keep adding to it over time. If you know of a great course (or a great business resource that’s free) please tell us in the comments below, or send us an email via this page. We would love to benefit from your collective wisdom. And you will be helping many people in the process, during a tough economic time. Visit: 145 Free Online Business Courses.
The History section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 60 courses. Some courses (like those featured below) focus on broad time periods and themes. Others take a look at more specialized topics that will keep you engaged for hours. All lectures were taped right in the classrooms of great universities:
China: Traditions and Transformations – Multiple Formats – Peter K. Bol & William Kirby, Harvard
European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present - YouTube - iTunes Video — Web — Thomas Lacquer, UC Berkeley
History of the World to 1500 CE – YouTube - iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
History of the World Since 1500 CE – YouTube — iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
The Western Tradition (Video) – YouTube – Eugen Weber, UCLA
US History: From Civil War to Present — iTunes Audio — Web — Jennifer Burns, UC Berkeley
As you can see, the courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web. And they’re all listed in our meta collection of 700 Free Online Courses. Other key disciplines found in the collection include Philosophy, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond.
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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.
How’s that New Year’s resolution going? You know, the one where you promised to make better use of your free time and learn new things? If you’re off track, fear not. It’s only April. It’s not too late to make good on your promise. And we can help. Below, we’ll tell you how to fill your Kindle, iPad, computer, smartphone, computer, etc. with free intelligent media — great ebooks and audio books, movies, courses, and the rest:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 400 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle –Nook) beforehand.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gagdets, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 700 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates). But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 525 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is one of your resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
When you dive into our collection of 1,700 Free Online Courses, you can begin an intellectual journey that can last for many months, if not years. The collection lets you drop into the classroom of leading universities (like Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Oxford) and essentially audit their courses for free. You get to be a fly on the wall and soak up whatever knowledge you want. All you need is an internet connection and some free time on your hands.
Today, we’re featuring two classes taught by Professor Richard Bulliet at Columbia University, which will teach you the history of the world in 46 lectures. The first course, History of the World to 1500 CE (available on YouTube and iTunes Video) takes you from prehistoric times to 1500, the cusp of early modernity. The origins of agriculture; the Greek, Roman and Persian empires; the rise of Islam and Christian medieval kingdoms; transformations in Asia; and the Maritime revolution — they’re all covered here.
In the second course, History of the World Since 1500 CE (find on YouTube), Bulliet focuses on the rise of colonialism in the Americas and India; historical developments in China, Japan and Korea; the Industrial Revolution; the Ottoman Empire; the emergence of Social Darwinism; and various key moments in 20th century history.
Bulliet helped write the popular textbook The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History, and it serves as the main textbook for the course. Above, we’re starting you off with Lecture 2, which moves from the Origins of Agriculture to the First River — Valley Civilizations, circa 8000–1500 B.C.E. The first lecture deals with methodological issues that underpin the course.
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In advance of its May 2013 concert series, Carnegie Hall has created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that will teach students how to listen to orchestras. The course, S4MU — short for Spring 4 Music University — is premised on the idea that “listening is an art itself,” and that you won’t overcome a tin ear by studying music theory alone. Starting on April 1, the four-week course will be taught by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop; ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan (seen above); composer Jennifer Higdon; vocalist Storm Large; and conductor Leonard Slatkin. Like all other MOOCs, the course is free. You can reserve your spot in the class right here.
Spring 4 Music University has been added to our complete list of MOOCs, where you will find 45 courses starting in April.
Thanks goes to Maxine for the heads up on this new offering.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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.
