Are you on the hunt for a free, open source platform that will let you deliver free online courses? We’ve already told you about one option: Google Course Builder. Now here’s another: Stanford’s Class2Go. The platform is open, meaning that you can grab the code base for free and run it on your very own server. Class2Go is also portable, giving schools the ability to move documents and media to other platforms if they so choose. The Stanford platform is interoperable in the sense that it builds on existing software (MySQL, Github, Piazza, MySQL, Python Django, etc.). And, unlike some other platforms, Class2Go gives educators immediate access to valuable data, allowing them to make refinements to the educational experience.
Although still under development, Class2Go is ready for action. In the fall, Stanford offered two MOOCs through Class2Go (Computer Networking and Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, & Batteries). And it has a new MOOC getting started today: Introduction to Databases taught by Jennifer Widom, the Chair of Stanford’s famed Computer Science department. (Watch her intro above.) You can take the course for free and learn all about database development. Or you can use it as an opportunity to see Class2Go up close.
Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:
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 375 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 600 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 500 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 high on your list of 2013 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including 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.
Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device.…
Back in 2009, Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel made his course, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, available on the web for free (YouTube — iTunes — Web). Suddenly lifelong learners around the world had access to a popular course enjoyed by more than 14,000 Harvard students over 30 years. Starting on March 12, 2013, Sandel plans to offer Justice as a free course through edX, the provider of MOOCs (or Massive Open Online Courses) created by Harvard and MIT. And here’s one thing you can guarantee: In a single offering, Sandel will bring his course to more students worldwide than he did through his decades teaching at Harvard.
FYI: edX announced other new spring courses. All will be added to our collection of Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities. They include:
Salman Khan’s model for free online education hinges on the micro lecture—brief tutorials on nearly every subject under the sun—delivered through YouTube. Launched in 2006, the Khan Academy now has a library of 3000 videos. That’s not bad, especially for a site with the elevated goal of providing a “free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” With the help of hundreds of volunteers, the site’s content is accessible in 18 languages. But even with all of that effort, Khan doesn’t achieve the global reach that it promises. The fact is that only 35 percent of the world’s population has access to the internet, which puts the idea of online learning behind a virtual firewall for many people.
Enter Khan Academy Lite, otherwise called KA Lite. This new service tries to work around that firewall. Software developer Jamie Alexandre and a team from UCSD developed an offline version of Khan’s learning model that can run on just about anything. Once you download the KA Lite software and install it on a Linux or Windows server, students can start watching Khan videos and exercises on computers/devices as tiny and cheap as the $35 Raspberry Pi. Actually, the whole server can be run on the Raspberry Pi!
You can download the software here and find installation instructions here. Jamie Alexandre offers his own introduction to KA Lite here.
Khan Academy Lite sits nicely alongside the free apps released for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch earlier this year. Be sure to check them out.
First thing you need to know: Before doing anything else, you should simply click “play” and start watching the video above. It doesn’t take long for Robert Sapolsky, one of Stanford’s finest teachers, to pull you right into his course. Better to watch him than listen to me.
Second thing to know: Sapolsky is a MacArthur Fellow, a world renowned neurobiologist, and an adept science writer best known for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Much of his research focuses on the interplay between the mind and body (how biology affects the mind, and the mind, the body), and that relationship lies at the heart of this course called “Human Behavioral Biology.”
Now the third: Human Behavioral Biology is available on YouTube and iTunes for free. The course, consisting of 25 videos spanning 36 hours, is otherwise listed in the Biology section of our big list of Free Online Courses (now 575 courses in total).
Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, became something of an internet celebrity because of his knack for presenting data in extremely imaginative ways. As you’ll see above, he’s the master of data visualization. Now, thanks to a new MOOC from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, you can develop some of these skills yourself. The free course, Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization, begins on January 12th and runs 6 weeks. The course is not taught by Rosling (sigh), but the current version of the course has drawn more than 2,000 people from 109 countries. Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization has been added to our collection of our Complete List of MOOCs and Certificate Courses.
We took our collection of 550 Free Online Courses from Great Universities and did a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the total number of hours of free audio/video lectures it offers. A conservative estimate puts it north of 15,000 hours. Pretty staggering, especially considering that these lectures come from world-class institutions like Stanford, MIT, Yale, UC Berkeley, and Oxford. And, what’s more, they’re free. Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch … and dinner. Above, we’re featuring the first lecture from Michael Sandel’s famous Harvard course called Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?. The remaining 549 Free Courses await you here.
And if you need a little late night snack too, then check out these other collections:
175 Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities
Begun in 2011 by Big Think and the Jack Parker Corporation, The Floating University is an online educational initiative that debuted at Harvard, Yale, and Bard College. The purpose of The Floating University, according to its site, is to “democratize access to the world’s best thinkers” by providing free, approximately one hour-long courses on a wide range of topics, taught at a university level by experts and professors in the various fields. The inaugural course, the most favored at the three universities, is Great Big Ideas, and it more or less does what it says: tackles some of the largest, most perplexing questions in digestible introductions that also manage to be rigorous, informative, and thought-provoking.
In the lecture above, for example, Harvard cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker presents an “eSeminar” in linguistics, addressing dogged questions in the field over whether or not humans have an innate, universal grammar (as Noam Chomsky has famously argued); why language is so fundamental to our social relationships; and how language evolved.
Pinker, who describes human language in broad terms as a “miracle” and a “window into the human mind,” also gets into the specific subfields of linguistics, discussing them in terms that any layperson can understand without much diluting the fascinating philosophical and scientific debates around what Darwin called our “instinctive tendency to speak” to one another, from infancy onward, all over the world, in some 6000 different languages.
The Great Big Ideas (now added to our list of 1200 Free Online Courses) lecture series consists of twelve lectures total, including Pinker’s. The other eleven are:
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
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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.
