Election 2012: Your Free Ticket to a Popular Stanford Course

in Current Affairs, Online Courses, Politics | October 1st, 2012

Last Tues­day night, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty kicked off a big course on the 2012 Elec­tion. 600 stu­dents packed into a crowd­ed audi­to­ri­um, fill­ing every seat, wait­ing for the course to begin. Led by David Kennedy (Pulitzer Prize-win­ning his­to­ri­an), Rob Reich (Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Stan­ford), and James Stey­er (CEO, Com­mon Sense Media), the course brings togeth­er “experts from Stanford’s fac­ul­ty, along with dis­tin­guished par­tic­i­pants in and ana­lysts of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.” And, togeth­er, they’re exam­in­ing major issues at stake in the elec­tion — for­eign pol­i­cy, the econ­o­my, the Supreme Court, cam­paign financ­ing, cam­paign strat­e­gy, etc.

The first week fea­tured con­ver­sa­tions with two sea­soned cam­paign strate­gists — Mark McK­in­non and Chris Lehane — who put away their dag­gers and had an unusu­al­ly civ­il con­ver­sa­tion about the Oba­ma-Rom­ney con­test, and the state of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics more gen­er­al­ly. Also join­ing the con­ver­sa­tion was Gary Segu­ra, a Stan­ford expert in polling, who offered up some firm pre­dic­tions about the elec­tion.

Although the course is filled to capac­i­ty, you can attend the course vir­tu­al­ly on iTunes and YouTube for free. (It will be added to our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online.) A com­plete list of upcom­ing speak­ers can be found here.

Full dis­clo­sure: This course was part­ly orga­nized by Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies where I hap­pi­ly spend my work­ing days. If you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, you should check out our amaz­ing pro­gram.

 

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

in Online Courses | September 20th, 2012

While you were sun­ning your­self on the beach this sum­mer — or just tak­ing a nice stay­ca­tion at home — we were busy track­ing down new cours­es to add to our list of 530 Free Online Cours­es. Avail­able via YouTube, iTunes or the web, these cours­es were taped on the cam­pus­es of top uni­ver­si­ties like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and UC Berke­ley. They range across diverse dis­ci­plines — Phi­los­o­phy, His­to­ry, Com­put­er Sci­ence, and Physics, to name a few — and you can access them all for free. Below we’re high­light­ing some of the most recent addi­tions to the big mas­ter list, and also throw­ing in a few inter­est­ing bonus picks. Hope you enjoy:

  • Aes­thet­ics & Phi­los­o­phy of Art – iTunes – Web — James Grant, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture – YouTube – Aysha Iqbal Viswamo­han, IIT Madras
  • Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners - iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video & Audio — Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
  • Dar­win and Design – Web Site – James Par­adis, MIT
  • Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture and Film — RSS Feed — Sean Dor­rance Kel­ly, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
  • Expos­ing Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy – iTunes Video — Web Site — RSS Feed — Dan Armen­dariz, Har­vard
  • Life in the Uni­verse – iTune­sU – Web – Richard Pogge, Ohio State
  • Kant’s Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son – iTunes Video – iTunes Audio — Video/Audio on Web – Dan Robin­son, Oxford
  • Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion — iTunes — Web — T. J. Maw­son, Oxford
  • Sci­ence Fic­tion and Pol­i­tics — iTunes Audio — Web –  Court­ney Brown, Emory Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Shake­speare After All: The Lat­er Plays – Mul­ti­ple For­mats – Mar­jorie Gar­ber, Har­vard
  • The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse – PBS Video – Cal Tech
  • The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry – YouTube - Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Bonus — A Few Uncon­ven­tion­al Cours­es:

  • Hegel: The Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry — Web Site — Leo Strauss, U Chica­go
  • Jack Ker­ouac – Web 1 and Web 2 – Allen Gins­berg, Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Plato’s Apol­o­gy of Socrates – YouTube – Allan Bloom, UChica­go
  • The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law – Web — YouTube – Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
  • This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Nor­ton Lec­tures – Web Audio – Jorge Luis Borges, Har­vard
  • The Unan­swered Ques­tion: 6 Lec­tures on Music - YouTube – Leonard Bern­stein, Har­vard

Look­ing for free text­books? Don’t miss our meta col­lec­tion of 160 Free Text­books avail­able on the web.

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Google Releases “Course Builder,” an Open Source Platform for Building Your Own Big Online Courses

in Google, Online Courses | September 12th, 2012

Ear­li­er this year, we saw Udac­i­ty and Cours­era take flight, two online ven­tures ded­i­cat­ed to offer­ing Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) and democ­ra­tiz­ing edu­ca­tion. Caught off-guard, tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties have scram­bled to get a foothold in this brave new world of e‑learning, and 16 uni­ver­si­ties have already signed agree­ments to offer their own MOOCs through Cours­era. We wel­come that trend. But, if you talk with profs at these uni­ver­si­ties, they often ask these ques­tions: Why are we pay­ing good mon­ey to devel­op cours­es that will build Cours­er­a’s busi­ness (which is for-prof­it and VC-backed)? Or why are we cre­at­ing cours­es for a plat­form that we don’t con­trol or have a stake in? They ask these ques­tions when they’re not oth­er­wise ask­ing “what will hap­pen to our jobs and beloved uni­ver­si­ties in 20 years?”

For schools ask­ing those ques­tions, Google might have an answer. Accord­ing to an announce­ment yes­ter­day, Google is releas­ing the code base for Course Builder, a new open source plat­form that will give indi­vid­ual edu­ca­tors and uni­ver­si­ties the abil­i­ty to cre­ate MOOCs of their own. As Peter Norvig, Google’s Direc­tor of Research, explains above, the com­pa­ny gave the plat­form a test dri­ve this sum­mer when it offered Pow­er Search­ing with Google, a course attend­ed by 155,000 reg­is­tered stu­dents. Now you can try it out too and bring MOOCs in-house, under your own con­trol. You can find doc­u­men­ta­tion to get start­ed here. But, as Norvig warns, you’ll need some tech skills in your toolk­it to make ini­tial head­way. In the future, you can almost guar­an­tee that the soft­ware will become user-friend­ly for every­one straight out of the box.

Already schools like Stan­ford, Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty, and UC San Diego are giv­ing Course Builder a look. Keep an eye on it.

Update: Stan­ford reports today that it is try­ing out its own open source plat­form. It’s called Class2Go. Learn more about it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

500 Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties: A Com­plete List

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India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012

Dur­ing the 1940s, when India won its inde­pen­dence from Britain, the lead­ers of the new­ly-formed nation began imag­in­ing the Indi­an Insti­tutes of Tech­nol­o­gy, oth­er­wise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cul­ti­vate some of the world’s top sci­en­tists and engi­neers. And they’d make tech­nol­o­gy key to the future of Indi­a’s eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indi­an edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and, like their peer insti­tu­tions in the US, they’re mak­ing a point of putting free cours­es on the web. Rather qui­et­ly, they’ve amassed some 268 cours­es, giv­ing any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion access to 10,000+ video lec­tures. As you might expect, the course line­up skews heav­i­ly toward sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, the stuff that con­tributes to Indi­a’s indus­tri­al base — Intro­duc­tion to Basic Elec­tron­ics, High Per­for­mance Com­put­er Archi­tec­ture, Space Flight Mechan­ics, Steel Mak­ing, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few con­tem­pla­tive cours­es to the mix, cours­es like Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture, Quan­tum Physics, the His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry, and Game The­o­ry and Eco­nom­ics.

You can start rum­mag­ing through the com­plete list of IIT cours­es on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT web­site, which gives you the abil­i­ty to down­load videos straight to your com­put­er. Nat­u­ral­ly we’ve added many essen­tial IIT cours­es to our list of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties — Har­vard, Yale, Stan­ford, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

 

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Total Noob to Learning Online? P2PU’s Peer-to-Peer Courses Hold Your Hand

in Education, Online Courses | July 23rd, 2012

Those of us inter­est­ed in explor­ing the myr­i­ad free cours­es avail­able online will appre­ci­ate the work being done at P2PU. It’s per­haps a fun­ny name when you first say it out loud, but P2PU’s approach and orig­i­nal learn­ing con­tent are for real.

You may have guessed what the name stands for: peer to peer uni­ver­si­ty. P2PU’s mod­el is inno­v­a­tive. Their idea is that tak­ing an online course should be more like learn­ing on the job than tak­ing a tra­di­tion­al class. Their approach encour­ages peo­ple to work togeth­er on projects—whether learn­ing com­put­ing pro­gram­ming or some­thing else—and to assess one another’s work with con­struc­tive feed­back.

Users can design their own cours­es with help from P2PU. Course design is bro­ken down into dis­crete steps and course con­tent is vet­ted by peer users and P2PU staff.

Cours­es are hands-on and super var­ied. One course lets users take a hack at design­ing their own big game—the kind that gets adults out in the streets defend­ing a foun­tain or hid­ing trea­sures under bus stop bench­es. Anoth­er cours­es lays out the steps for mak­ing a music video. Fif­teen oth­er peo­ple are already tak­ing the chal­lenge. Two have com­plet­ed it and four men­tors have offered their help.

One of the most pop­u­lar cours­es is about writ­ing for the web. The com­ments sec­tions for each step are live­ly and filled with links to real blogs. Par­tic­i­pants in this course share their writ­ing and opin­ions about what makes for good web writ­ing.

One of the site’s oth­er well-sub­scribed cours­es teach­es par­tic­i­pants how to pro­gram using the Twit­ter API. P2PU breaks the chal­lenge down into nine steps (the first of which is to intro­duce your­self to oth­ers already tak­ing the course). Par­tic­i­pants pro­ceed at their own pace and can reach out for help to oth­er stu­dents, men­tors and P2PU staff along the way.

Not all of the cours­es focus on new tech­nolo­gies. Always use­ful and nev­er out-of-date, this course is a per­fect fit for num­ber noobs.

You can find a list of P2Pu’s new cours­es here. And while you’ve got your think­ing cap on, don’t for­get our big list of 500 Free Online Cours­es.

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

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Coursera Strikes Partnerships with 12 Universities, Raises More $$$, Announces a Long List of Courses

in Online Courses, Stanford | July 17th, 2012

There’s an inter­est­ing com­pe­ti­tion shap­ing up between Udac­i­ty and Cours­era. Spe­cial­iz­ing in offer­ing Mas­sive­ly Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs), both ven­tures spun out of Stan­ford ear­li­er this year. But they did so in very dif­fer­ent ways. When Sebas­t­ian Thrun, Udac­i­ty’s founder, left his tenured posi­tion at Stan­ford, he kicked a lit­tle sand in the Uni­ver­si­ty’s face. And true to its name, Udac­i­ty (oh the audac­i­ty!) has posi­tioned itself as an out­sider. It isn’t part­ner­ing with estab­lished uni­ver­si­ties (so far as we know). Rather, it’s cre­at­ing cours­es under its own brand (à la Khan Acad­e­my and The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny) and exert­ing top-down con­trol over the prod­uct (à la Apple). It’s an approach that has obvi­ous upsides and down­sides.

Mean­while, Cours­era is head­ing down a very dif­fer­ent path. The founders (both Stan­ford pro­fes­sors) did­n’t snub their employ­er, and they’ve instead built a plat­form on which tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties can launch their own open cours­es. The down­side: the com­pa­ny does­n’t exer­cise great con­trol over the cours­es being built. The upside: they can lever­age the brands of great uni­ver­si­ties, and the many cours­es they’ll build. Case in point.…

Today, Cours­era is announc­ing that they’ve signed part­ner­ship agree­ments with 12 new uni­ver­si­ties: Geor­gia Tech, Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, Cal­tech, Rice Uni­ver­si­ty,  Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh, Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, EPFL — Lau­sanne, Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty (School of Pub­lic Health), UCSF, Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois. That’s in addi­tion to their four exist­ing part­ners: Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, Prince­ton, Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and Stan­ford.

There’s a lot of great insti­tu­tions enter­ing Cours­er­a’s sta­ble. And they’ll bring with them over 60 cours­es in the com­ing months. (Find a com­plete list of cours­es below the jump.) We’ll keep you post­ed on how Cours­era and Udac­i­ty evolve, and, in the com­ing weeks, we’ll care­ful­ly test dri­ve their cours­es and let you know the pros and cons of each. Stay tuned for more from the bat­tle of the MOOCs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cours­era Adds Human­i­ties Cours­es, Rais­es $16 Mil­lion, Strikes Deal with 3 Uni­ver­si­ties

Har­vard and MIT Cre­ate EDX to Offer Free Online Cours­es World­wide

Udac­i­ty to Launch 5 New Cours­es, from Sta­tis­tics to Physics. Shoot­ing for Largest Online Class Ever.

Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties: A Com­plete List

(more…)

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Our Big List of 500 Free Courses Featured by The Young Turks

in Online Courses | July 14th, 2012

Yes­ter­day, the team at The Young Turks Uni­ver­si­ty cre­at­ed a lit­tle video seg­ment pro­mot­ing our big list of 500 Free Online Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties. As they right­ly explain, the list lets you down­load free cours­es from schools like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and UC Berke­ley. And when you dive in, you’ll dis­cov­er 55 cours­es in Phi­los­o­phy, 50 in His­to­ry, 50 in Com­put­er Sci­ence, and 35 in Physics, plus lec­tures from famous intel­lec­tu­als like Richard Feyn­man, Leo Strauss, Bertrand Rus­sell, Michel Fou­cault and Richard Dawkins. Final­ly, you can usu­al­ly access the cours­es from mul­ti­ple sources — YouTube, iTunes or uni­ver­si­ty web sites. So what are you wait­ing for? Dive right into the com­plete list here and start using your leisure time in a pro­duc­tive way.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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Udacity to Launch 5 New Courses, from Statistics to Physics. Shooting for Largest Online Class Ever.

in Math, Online Courses | June 18th, 2012

This week­end, the Wall Street Jour­nal pub­lished a gush­ing lit­tle pro­file on Sebas­t­ian Thrun. By now, you prob­a­bly know his bio. Thrun helped invent the self-dri­ving car at Google and taught arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence at Stan­ford, before ditch­ing his tenured teach­ing posi­tion and launch­ing Udac­i­ty, a new ven­ture that offers MOOCs (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) to stu­dents every­where.

Also this week­end, Thrun kicked off an effort to “break the stu­dent record for the largest online class ever taught” with his new class, Intro­duc­tion to Sta­tis­tics: Mak­ing Deci­sions Based on Data. It starts June 25, and above you can watch Thrun give a short (Hans Rosling-like) intro­duc­tion to the class.  The course is entire­ly free and open to stu­dents every­where. Stu­dents will receive dynam­ic feed­back along the way, and dili­gent stu­dents will get a cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion at the end. So what’s stop­ping you? Cer­tain­ly not mon­ey or geog­ra­phy. Oth­er cours­es start­ing on June 25 include:

Intro to Physics: Land­marks in Physics

Algo­rithms: Crunch­ing Social Net­works

Log­ic & Dis­crete Math­e­mat­ics: Foun­da­tions of Com­put­ing

Soft­ware Test­ing: How to Make Soft­ware Fail

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cours­era Adds Human­i­ties Cours­es, Rais­es $16 Mil­lion, Strikes Deal with 3 Uni­ver­si­ties

Har­vard and MIT Cre­ate EDX to Offer Free Online Cours­es World­wide

Why the Uni­ver­si­ty Sys­tem, as We Know It, Won’t Last …. and What’s Com­ing Next

Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties: A Com­plete List

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