The Making of Modern Ukraine: A Free Online Course from Yale University, Featuring 23 Lectures

in Current Affairs, Online Courses, Yale | December 27th, 2022

Back in Sep­tem­ber, we men­tioned that Yale his­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der had start­ed teach­ing a course, The Mak­ing of Mod­ern Ukraine, and putting the lec­tures online. With the fall semes­ter now over, you can watch 23 lec­tures on YouTube. All of the lec­tures appear above, or on this playlist. Key ques­tions explored by the course include:

What brought about the Ukrain­ian nation?  Ukraine must have exist­ed as a soci­ety and poli­ty on 23 Feb­ru­ary 2022, else Ukraini­ans would not have col­lec­tive­ly resist­ed Russ­ian inva­sion the next day.  Why has the exis­tence of Ukraine occa­sioned such con­tro­ver­sy?  In what ways are Pol­ish, Russ­ian, and Jew­ish self-under­stand­ing depen­dent upon expe­ri­ences in Ukraine?  Just how and when did a mod­ern Ukrain­ian nation emerge?  Just how for that mat­ter does any mod­ern nation emerge?  And why some nations and not oth­ers?  What is the bal­ance between struc­ture and agency in his­to­ry?  Can nations be cho­sen, and does it mat­ter?  Can the choic­es of indi­vid­u­als influ­ence the rise of much larg­er social orga­ni­za­tions?  If so, how?  Ukraine was the coun­try most touched by Sovi­et and Nazi ter­ror: what can we learn about those sys­tems, then, from Ukraine?  Is the post-colo­nial, mul­ti­lin­gual Ukrain­ian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?

A syl­labus for the course can be found on Sny­der’s Sub­stack.

The Mak­ing of Mod­ern Ukraine will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

A Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion of On Tyran­ny: Twen­ty Lessons from the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, the Best­selling Book by His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

Sav­ing Ukrain­ian Cul­tur­al Her­itage Online: 1,000+ Librar­i­ans Dig­i­tal­ly Pre­serve Arti­facts of Ukrain­ian Civ­i­liza­tion Before Rus­sia Can Destroy Them

Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Min­utes

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Take Graphic Design Courses to Launch Your Career as a Graphic Designer, Video Game Designer, UI Designer & More

in Design, Online Courses | June 30th, 2022

What can you do with graph­ic design skills? More and more, it seems, as emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies dri­ve new apps, soft­ware, and games. New design chal­lenges are every­where, from human-machine inter­faces, to 3D mod­el­ing in video games and ani­mat­ed films, to re-imag­in­ing clas­sic designs in print and on screen. In addi­tion to tra­di­tion­al jobs like art direc­tor, graph­ic design­er, pro­duc­tion artist, and ani­ma­tor, the past few years have seen a sharp rise in demand for User Expe­ri­ence (UX) and User Inter­face (UI) design­ers, roles that require a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent cre­ative and tech­ni­cal skill sets.

You could get a four-year degree in design to work in one of these fields, or you could take a Cours­era Spe­cial­iza­tion and be one step clos­er. Cours­era has met the demand for new job skills and tech edu­ca­tion by part­ner­ing with top arts insti­tu­tions and uni­ver­si­ties to offer online cours­es at low cost. All of these cours­es grant cer­tifi­cates that show poten­tial employ­ers you’re ready to put your learn­ing to use. If careers in art and con­tem­po­rary design, graph­ic design, web user expe­ri­ence and inter­face design, or video game design appeal to you, you can learn those skills in the five cer­tifi­cate-grant­i­ng Spe­cial­iza­tion pro­grams below.

Graph­ic design­ers can choose to be as spe­cial­ized or gen­er­al­ized as they like, but as in all cre­ative fields, they need a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the basics. A Cours­era Spe­cial­iza­tion is a series of cours­es intend­ed to lead stu­dents to mas­tery, build­ing on the his­to­ry and foun­da­tions of the field. You can enroll for free and try out any of the Spe­cial­iza­tions for 7 days. After that, you’ll be charged between $39-$49 per month until you com­plete the cours­es in a Spe­cial­iza­tion. (Finan­cial aid is avail­able).

The excit­ing Spe­cial­iza­tions from CALARTS and the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art will bring you many steps clos­er to a new career, or maybe even a new per­son­al pas­sion project.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Unveils a Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months       

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Computer Scientist Andrew Ng Presents a New Series of Machine Learning Courses–an Updated Version of the Popular Course Taken by 5 Million Students

in Artificial Intelligence, Online Courses, Technology | June 22nd, 2022

Back in 2017, Cours­era co-founder and for­mer Stan­ford com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor Andrew Ng launched a five-part series of cours­es on “Deep Learn­ing” on the edtech plat­form, a series meant to “help you mas­ter Deep Learn­ing, apply it effec­tive­ly, and build a career in AI.” These cours­es extend­ed his ini­tial Machine Learn­ing course, which has attract­ed almost 5 mil­lion stu­dents since 2012, in an effort, he said, to build “a new AI-pow­ered soci­ety.”

Ng’s goals are ambi­tious, to “teach mil­lions of peo­ple to use these AI tools so they can go and invent the things that no large com­pa­ny, or com­pa­ny I could build, could do.” His new Machine Learn­ing Spe­cial­iza­tion at Cours­era takes him sev­er­al steps fur­ther in that direc­tion with an “updat­ed ver­sion of [his] pio­neer­ing Machine Learn­ing course,” notes Cours­er­a’s descrip­tion, pro­vid­ing “a broad intro­duc­tion to mod­ern machine learn­ing.” The spe­cial­iza­tion’s three cours­es include 1) Super­vised Machine Learn­ing: Regres­sion and Clas­si­fi­ca­tion, 2) Advanced Learn­ing Algo­rithms, and 3) Unsu­per­vised Learn­ing, Rec­om­menders, Rein­force­ment Learn­ing. Col­lec­tive­ly, the cours­es in the spe­cial­iza­tion will teach you to:

  • Build machine learn­ing mod­els in Python using pop­u­lar machine learn­ing libraries NumPy and scik­it-learn.
  • Build and train super­vised machine learn­ing mod­els for pre­dic­tion and bina­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion tasks, includ­ing lin­ear regres­sion and logis­tic regres­sion.
  • Build and train a neur­al net­work with Ten­sor­Flow to per­form mul­ti-class clas­si­fi­ca­tion.
  • Apply best prac­tices for machine learn­ing devel­op­ment so that your mod­els gen­er­al­ize to data and tasks in the real world.
  • Build and use deci­sion trees and tree ensem­ble meth­ods, includ­ing ran­dom forests and boost­ed trees.
  • Use unsu­per­vised learn­ing tech­niques for unsu­per­vised learn­ing: includ­ing clus­ter­ing and anom­aly detec­tion.
  • Build rec­om­mender sys­tems with a col­lab­o­ra­tive fil­ter­ing approach and a con­tent-based deep learn­ing method.
  • Build a deep rein­force­ment learn­ing mod­el.

The skills stu­dents learn in Ng’s spe­cial­iza­tion will bring them clos­er to careers in big data, machine learn­ing, and AI engi­neer­ing. Enroll in Ng’s Spe­cial­iza­tion here free for 7 days and explore the mate­ri­als in all three cours­es. If you’re con­vinced the spe­cial­iza­tion is for you, you’ll pay $49 per month until you com­plete the three-course spe­cial­iza­tion, and you’ll earn a cer­tifi­cate upon com­ple­tion of a hands-on project using all of your new machine learn­ing skills. You can sign up for the Machine Learn­ing Spe­cial­iza­tion here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Cours­era Makes Cours­es & Cer­tifi­cates Free Dur­ing Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine: Take Cours­es in Psy­chol­o­gy, Music, Well­ness, Pro­fes­sion­al Devel­op­ment & More Online

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Google Unveils a Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months       

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Business, Education, Online Courses | May 13th, 2022

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now comes their latest–a cer­tifi­cate ded­i­cat­ed to Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate con­sists of sev­en cours­es, all col­lec­tive­ly designed to help stu­dents “devel­op dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce strate­gies; attract and engage cus­tomers through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels like search and email; mea­sure mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, ana­lyze e‑commerce per­for­mance, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.” The cours­es include:

In total, this pro­gram “includes over 190 hours of instruc­tion and prac­tice-based assess­ments, which sim­u­late real-world dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce sce­nar­ios that are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place.” Along the way, stu­dents will learn how to use tools and plat­forms like Can­va, Con­stant Con­tact, Google Ads, Google Ana­lyt­ics, Hoot­suite, Hub­Spot, Mailchimp, Shopi­fy, and Twit­ter. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

If you don’t want to pay, you can audit each course for free, with­out ulti­mate­ly receiv­ing the cer­tifi­cate.

Explore the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Google Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate: 8 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

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Finding Purpose & Meaning In Life: Living for What Matters Most–A Free Online Course from the University of Michigan

in Life, Online Courses | May 8th, 2022

From the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan comes a course for our dis­ori­ent­ing times–Find­ing Pur­pose and Mean­ing In Life: Liv­ing for What Mat­ters Most. Taught by Vic Strech­er, a pro­fes­sor in the Schools of Pub­lic Health and Med­i­cine, the course promis­es stu­dents this:

In this course, you’ll learn how sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy and prac­tice all play a role in both find­ing your pur­pose and liv­ing a pur­pose­ful life. You will hear from his­tor­i­cal fig­ures and indi­vid­u­als about their jour­neys to find­ing and liv­ing a pur­pose­ful life, and will walk through dif­fer­ent exer­cis­es to help you find out what mat­ters most to you so you can live a pur­pose­ful life.

By the end of the course, stu­dents will:

1. Under­stand that hav­ing a strong pur­pose in life is an essen­tial ele­ment of human well-being.
2. Know how self-tran­scend­ing pur­pose pos­i­tive­ly affects well-being.
3. Be able to cre­ate a pur­pose for your life (don’t be intim­i­dat­ed, this is dif­fer­ent from cre­at­ing “the pur­pose” for your life).
4. Apply per­son­al approach­es and skills to self-change and become and stay con­nect­ed to your pur­pose every day.

To take the course for free, selec­tion the Audit Only option avail­able upon reg­is­tra­tion.

Find­ing Pur­pose and Mean­ing In Life: Liv­ing for What Mat­ters Most will be added to our list: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Any­one inter­est­ed can watch Vic Strecher’s TED Talk here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Sci­ence of Well-Being: Take a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale University’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist, Auschwitz Sur­vivor Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

What is the Secret to Liv­ing a Long, Hap­py & Cre­ative­ly Ful­fill­ing Life?: Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Con­cept of Iki­gai

97-Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

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A Master List of 1,700 Free Courses From Top Universities: A Lifetime of Learning on One Page

in Online Courses | April 24th, 2022


For the past 15 years, we’ve been busy rum­mag­ing around the inter­net and adding cours­es to an ever-grow­ing list of Free Online Cours­es, which now fea­tures 1,700 cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you down­load audio & video lec­tures from schools like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and many oth­er insti­tu­tions. Gen­er­al­ly, the cours­es can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or uni­ver­si­ty web sites, and you can lis­ten to the lec­tures any­time, any­where, on your com­put­er or smart phone. We haven’t done a pre­cise cal­cu­la­tion, but there’s about 50,000 hours of free audio & video lec­tures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time–something that’s use­ful dur­ing these social­ly dis­tant times.

Right now you’ll find 200 free phi­los­o­phy cours­es, 105 free his­to­ry cours­es, 170 free com­put­er sci­ence cours­es, 85 free physics cours­es and 55 Free Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es in the col­lec­tion, and that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. You can peruse sec­tions cov­er­ing Astron­o­my, Biol­o­gy, Busi­ness, Chem­istry, Eco­nom­ics, Engi­neer­ing, Math, Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Psy­chol­o­gy and Reli­gion.

Here are some high­lights from the com­plete list of Free Online Cours­es. We’ve added a few unconventional/vintage cours­es in the mix just to keep things inter­est­ing.

The com­plete list of cours­es can be accessed here: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. For more enrich­ing mate­r­i­al, see our oth­er col­lec­tions below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Learn 45+ Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More.

200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

 

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Russian Invasion of Ukraine Teach-Out: A Free Course from the University of Michigan

in Current Affairs, History, Online Courses | March 6th, 2022

From the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan comes a free short course on the Russ­ian Inva­sion of Ukraine. Here’s how they set the con­text for the course, which you can find on the Cours­era plat­form:

“The armed con­flict in Ukraine first start­ed in the begin­ning of 2014, when Rus­sia invad­ed and annexed the Ukrain­ian region of Crimea. Over the past eight years, there has been ongo­ing con­flict between Ukraine and Rus­sia, with reg­u­lar shelling and skir­mish­es occur­ring along Russ­ian and Ukrain­ian bor­ders in the east­ern part of the coun­try. On Feb­ru­ary 24, 2022, Rus­sia launched a full-scale mil­i­tary inva­sion of Ukraine, plung­ing the entire coun­try into war and send­ing shock­waves across the world. With casu­al­ties mount­ing and over one mil­lion Ukraini­ans flee­ing the coun­try, the need for dia­logue and de-esca­la­tion have nev­er been high­er. In this Teach-Out, you will learn from a diverse group of guest experts about the his­to­ry and ori­gins of war in Ukraine, its imme­di­ate and long-term impacts, and what you can do to sup­port peo­ple in this grow­ing human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis. Specif­i­cal­ly this Teach-Out will address the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

- How did we get here? Why did Rus­sia invade Ukraine?
— What his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­texts do we need to know about in order to under­stand this con­flict?
— How is cyber and infor­ma­tion war­fare impact­ing the con­flict in Ukraine?
— What can be done to stop this war?
— How can we sup­port Ukrain­ian refugees and dis­placed peo­ples?”

Sign up for the course here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Min­utes

Why Rus­sia Invad­ed Ukraine: A Use­ful Primer

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Russian Invasion of Ukraine Teach-Out: A Free Course from the University of Michigan ) |

Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate: 7 Courses Helps Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Design, Online Courses | February 7th, 2022

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” One such cer­tifi­cate focus­es on User Expe­ri­ence Design, or what’s called UX Design, the process design teams use to cre­ate prod­ucts that pro­vide mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences to users.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate fea­tures sev­en cours­es, includ­ing the Foun­da­tions of User Expe­ri­ence, Start the UX Design Process, Build Wire­frames and Low-Fideli­ty Pro­to­types, and Con­duct UX Research and Test Ear­ly Con­cepts. In total, this pro­gram “includes over 200 hours of instruc­tion and hun­dreds of prac­tice-based activ­i­ties and assess­ments that sim­u­late real-world UX design sce­nar­ios and are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place. The con­tent is high­ly inter­ac­tive and devel­oped by Google employ­ees with decades of expe­ri­ence in UX design.” Upon com­ple­tion, stu­dents can direct­ly apply for jobs with Google and over 130 U.S. employ­ers, includ­ing Wal­mart, Best Buy, and Astreya. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

Explore the User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate by watch­ing the video above. Learn more about the over­all Google career cer­tifi­cate ini­tia­tive here. And find oth­er Google pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cates here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Intro­duces 6‑Month Career Cer­tifi­cates, Threat­en­ing to Dis­rupt High­er Edu­ca­tion with “the Equiv­a­lent of a Four-Year Degree”

Cours­era and Google Launch an Online Cer­tifi­cate Pro­gram to Help Stu­dents Become IT Pro­fes­sion­als & Get Attrac­tive Jobs

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.