The History of Western Architecture: A Free Online Course Moving from Ancient Greece to Rococo

in Architecture, Online Courses | November 8th, 2012

Image by Arild Vågen, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you have plans to vis­it the Old World any time soon, you should spend a few good min­utes — make that hours — with The His­to­ry of Archi­tec­ture, a free course that recent­ly debuted on YouTube. Taught by Jacque­line Gar­gus at Ohio State, the course fea­tures 39 video lec­tures that col­lec­tive­ly offer a clas­sic sur­vey of West­ern archi­tec­ture. We begin in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, lay­ing the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions for what’s to come. Then we dive head­long into Islam­ic, Byzan­tine and Medieval archi­tec­ture, before spend­ing a good deal of time with Renais­sance, Baroque, and Roco­co styles. Of course, we encounter many great land­marks along the way: the pyra­mids of Egypt, the tem­ples of Ancient Greece, the Hagia Sophia in Con­stan­tino­ple, Chartres in France, Brunelleschi’s Duo­mo of Flo­rence, and the list goes on. The course appears on YouTube. Find the lec­tures below.

The His­to­ry of Archi­tec­ture has been added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. And if/when Prof. Gar­gus posts a sequel that gets us into mod­ern times, we’ll be sure to let you know.

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:

Enroll in Harvard’s Free Online Archi­tec­ture Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the His­to­ry & The­o­ry of Archi­tec­ture

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale

Take an Online Course on Design & Archi­tec­ture with Frank Gehry

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Carnegie Mellon Takes Online Courses to Another Level with Its Open Learning Initiative

in Education, Online Courses | November 7th, 2012

Open online cours­es—mas­sive or otherwise—are rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing high­er edu­ca­tion by mak­ing learn­ing more and more acces­si­ble.

Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty has tak­en online cours­es to anoth­er lev­el, offer­ing vir­tu­al class­room envi­ron­ments based on deep research into how adults learn.

The cours­es are free. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive cur­rent­ly offers 15 cours­es through a plat­form that pro­vides tar­get­ed progress feed­back to stu­dents.

The pro­gram doesn’t offer course cred­it or cer­tifi­cates but the cours­es are sophis­ti­cat­ed. CMU spent any­where from $500,000 to $1 mil­lion for each course to write the soft­ware, which includes a course builder pro­gram for instruc­tors and a sys­tem of feed­back loops that send stu­dent learn­ing data to the instruc­tor, the stu­dent and the course design team.

More than 10,000 stu­dents enrolled in OLI cours­es last year. So far CMU pro­motes OLI cours­es as sup­ple­men­tary to tra­di­tion­al class­room instruc­tion. But the cours­es are cer­tain­ly rich enough to be enjoyed by any­one. They’re most­ly in the sci­ences but include a few lan­guage and social sci­ence class­es too.

The list of cur­rent­ly-avail­able cours­es appears below. We also have them list­ed in our com­plete list of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties (many of which hap­pen to offer cer­tifi­cates too):

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work on thenifty.blogspot.com and .

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Go International

in Online Courses | November 5th, 2012

A few quick notes from the MOOC front.…

The first major providers of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) got their start in Sil­i­con Val­ley, Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts and Cana­da. Now we’re see­ing them sprout up out­side of the Unit­ed States. Take for exam­ple OpenLearning.com, a ven­ture born out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of New South Wales (UNSW) in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia. Start­ing this week, you can begin tak­ing two of their cours­es (Observ­ing and Analysing Per­for­mance in Sport & Ser­vices Mar­ket­ing – The Next Lev­el). Or you can check into a 12-week course that recent­ly got under­way: UNSW Com­put­ing 1.

Mean­while, if you can exer­cise a lit­tle patience, you can even­tu­al­ly start tak­ing class­es with the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Aus­tralia. By next March, the Perth-based uni­ver­si­ty plans to offer two cours­es (one in soci­ol­o­gy, the oth­er in oceanog­ra­phy) using an adapt­ed ver­sion of Stan­ford’s open source plat­form, Class2Go. The cours­es will be deliv­ered over mobile phones.

Final­ly, if you’re look­ing to learn a new lan­guage, why not try Span­ish­Mooc? It’s billed as “the first open online Span­ish course for every­one.” And it’s seem­ing­ly run as an inde­pen­dent project not asso­ci­at­ed with an exist­ing uni­ver­si­ty. The 12-week course will start on Jan­u­ary 21, 2013.

For a com­plete list of MOOCs, vis­it our col­lec­tion of 130 Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.

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13 Lectures by The Great Courses

in Online Courses | November 2nd, 2012

brain image

Note: The free lec­tures by The Great Cours­es have been tak­en offline. But no wor­ries, you can find over 33,000 hours of free lec­tures from top uni­ver­si­ties in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. They’ll keep you busy for years to come.

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!

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50 Free Online Certificate Courses Starting Soon (Including Intro to Philosophy)

in Online Courses, Philosophy | October 30th, 2012

A quick heads up: Sev­er­al weeks back, we rolled out a handy list of Free Cours­es Grant­i­ng Cer­tifi­cates from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. We start­ed with 60 cours­es, and we’ve now added anoth­er 50. They all start in the near future (between Novem­ber and Jan­u­ary), and they most­ly come from the two biggest providers of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es — Cours­era and Udac­i­ty (which just land­ed $15 mil­lion in fund­ing last week).

Above we’re fea­tur­ing a clip pro­mot­ing a course called Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy. It comes cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh, an insti­tu­tion first found­ed in 1583, that hopes to teach a time­less dis­ci­pline in a new way. So far, Cours­era and Udac­i­ty have only offered cours­es in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy  — in dis­ci­plines that yield rather quan­tifi­able answers. Now it’s time to see how they can han­dle sub­jects where the ques­tions and answers are more sub­tle. The free course begins on Jan­u­ary 28, and any stu­dent who suc­cess­ful­ly com­pletes the inter­ac­tive course will receive “a cer­tifi­cate signed by the instruc­tors.” Sign up here, and find a com­plete list of online cer­tifi­cate cours­es here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big List of 530 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties (New Addi­tions)

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A Big List of 375 Free eBooks for Your iPad, Kin­dle, Nook and Oth­er Devices

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A List of 60 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities (Some Starting This Week!)

in Online Courses | October 15th, 2012

Ear­li­er this year we began telling you about a poten­tial rev­o­lu­tion in edu­ca­tion — the birth of MOOCs, or Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es. As explained above, these cours­es let stu­dents, thou­sands at a time, take cours­es from great uni­ver­si­ties for free online. What’s more, most of these cours­es offer stu­dents a cre­den­tial — some­thing like a cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion — if they mas­ter the mate­r­i­al cov­ered in the class. Some of the MOOC providers are well known: Cours­era, Udac­i­ty, and edX. Oth­ers, like Class2Go, Google Course Builder and Ven­ture Lab, are just emerg­ing. But, togeth­er, they’re pro­duc­ing cours­es at break­neck speed, and we thought it was time to start orga­niz­ing a list for you.

Today, we’re rolling out a list of 60 Free Cours­es Grant­i­ng Cer­tifi­cates from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. The list orga­nizes cours­es chrono­log­i­cal­ly by start date, and it indi­cates the kind of cre­den­tial the cours­es offer — for exam­ple, Cer­tifi­cates of Com­ple­tion, State­ments of Accom­plish­ment, or Cer­tifi­cates of Mas­tery. The list, which hap­pens to include anoth­er 15 cours­es not bear­ing cer­tifi­cates, will be reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed. You can expect it to grow rapid­ly, and you can always access it by click­ing Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es in the top nav­i­ga­tion of our web site. Below we have list­ed a num­ber of online cours­es start­ing this week:

Get the full list here. It includes 75 Mas­sive Open Cours­es in total.

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Codecademy’s Free Courses Democratize Computer Programming

in Computer Science, Education, Online Courses, Technology, Web/Tech | October 11th, 2012

There are good and bad online instruc­tion­al plat­forms for every­thing: some lan­guage cours­es work bet­ter than oth­ers and some approach­es to teach­ing music are more effec­tive than oth­ers.

This is just as true for com­put­er pro­gram­ming, where, like every­thing else, an abun­dance of free cours­es and tuto­ri­als from MIT, UC Berke­ley, Har­vard and Stan­ford offer inter­ac­tive tools for learn­ing web devel­op­ment and com­put­er pro­gram­ming. You can find a long list of free comp sci cours­es from these great uni­ver­si­ties here.

One new site that is get­ting par­tic­u­lar­ly good reviews is Codecad­e­my, a free online learn­ing sys­tem for learn­ing every­thing from HTML Basics  to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tuto­ri­als to design projects of their own choos­ing. It’s also easy to track your progress.

What sets Codecad­e­my apart from oth­er pro­gram­ming tuto­ri­als is that all stu­dent work can be com­plet­ed with­in a web brows­er. No soft­ware down­load­ing or installing is required. Respond­ing to crit­i­cism that the site did­n’t ini­tial­ly offer enough cours­es, Codecad­e­my has added numer­ous cours­es in 2012 and launched a Course Cre­ator pro­gram. This is a boon for users inter­est­ed in learn­ing how to teach. Codecad­e­my does not put user-cre­at­ed cours­es through an approval process and gives course cre­ators a link that they can dis­trib­ute as they wish. Codecad­e­my does, how­ev­er, screen the cours­es and selects which to fea­ture on its own site.

Enrollees in its Code Year pro­gram receive a pro­gram­ming les­son in their email inbox every Mon­day, start­ing with the fun­da­men­tals of JavaScript and then mov­ing on to HTML and CSS. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple signed up at the begin­ning of the year (includ­ing the White House and New York May­or Michael Bloomberg). If you were one the enrollees, it’s still not too late to keep that New Year’s res­o­lu­tion.

Find Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. Find more of her work at .

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Marginal Revolution University Launches, Bringing Free Online Courses in Economics to the Web

in Economics, Online Courses | October 8th, 2012

A great year for open edu­ca­tion got even bet­ter with the launch of Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty. Found­ed by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabar­rok, two econ pro­fes­sors at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty, MRUni­ver­si­ty promis­es to deliv­er free, inter­ac­tive cours­es in the eco­nom­ics space. And they’re get­ting start­ed with a course on Devel­op­ment Eco­nom­ics, a sub­dis­ci­pline that explores why some coun­tries grow rich and oth­ers remain poor. In short, issues that have real mean­ing for every­day peo­ple world­wide.

In an announce­ment on the Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion blog last month, Cowen out­lined a few of the prin­ci­ples guid­ing the project:

1. The prod­uct is free, and we offer more mate­r­i­al in less time.

2. Most of our videos are short, so you can view and lis­ten between tasks, rather than need­ing to sched­ule time for them.  The aver­age video is five min­utes, twen­ty-eight sec­onds long.  When need­ed, more videos are used to explain com­plex top­ics.

3. No talk­ing heads and no long, bor­ing lec­tures.  We have tried to recon­cep­tu­al­ize every aspect of the edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence to be friend­ly to the on-line world.

4. It is low band­width and mobile-friend­ly.  No ads.

5. We offer tests and quizzes.

6. We have plans to sub­ti­tle the videos in major lan­guages.  Our reach will be glob­al, and in doing so we are build­ing upon the glob­al empha­sis of our home insti­tu­tion, George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.

7. We invite users to sub­mit con­tent.

8. It is a flex­i­ble learn­ing mod­ule.  It is not a “MOOC” per se, although it can be used to cre­ate a MOOC, name­ly a mas­sive, open on-line course.

9. It is designed to grow rapid­ly and flex­i­bly, absorb­ing new con­tent in mod­u­lar fash­ion — note the bee­hive struc­ture to our logo.  But we are start­ing with plen­ty of mate­r­i­al.

10. We are pleased to announce that our first course will begin on Octo­ber 1.

Book­mark MRUni­ver­si­ty and look out for its cur­ricu­lum to expand. In the mean­time, you can explore more Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT’s Intro­duc­tion to Eco­nom­ics: A Free Online Course

Free Online Eco­nom­ics & Finance Cours­es

Mas­ter­ing Econo­met­rics: A Free Online Course

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