A quick update for you. Yale University has added its third batch of courses to its open education initiative, bringing the total number of courses to 25. (Find the complete list here.) The latest round is slightly bigger than previous ones, which bucks the trend that we’re generally seeing. (Open Courses have been in a noticeable slump for the past year.) Below, I have listed the newly added courses and provided links to iTunes, YouTube, and pages where you can download the courses in various other formats. I have also added these courses to our online collection of Free Courses from top universities. This collection now features over 250 free courses, all ready to download to your computer or mp3 player. iPhone owners can also find many other courses on our free iPhone app.
Freudianism may no longer be in vogue. But, even so, Sigmund Freud remains one of the most envelope-pushing thinkers of the past century, someone still worth getting to know. In this lecture, Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom offers a primer on Freud and Freudian thought. The lecture is part of a larger free course (20 lectures in total) called “Introduction to Psychology.” You can access the course via the Yale Open Course web site, YouTube and iTunesU.
Over the past two years, Yale has released fifteen free “open courses.” Initially, these courses were only available through Yale’s web site and later YouTube. Now, they’re also accessible through iTunesU — which means that you can put these courses on your iPod with relative ease. Just click here and scroll down, and you’ll find well-produced courses that cover economics, history, literature, physics, medicine and more. Thanks to this integration with iTunes, we’ll soon be able to include these courses in the Open Culture iPhone app. If you haven’t played with it, give it a try. In the meantime, all Yale courses appear in our collection of Free Courses, featuring online classes from top universities.
In the past, I have written about Yale’s best-of-breed Open Course initiative, which makes available 15 free courses. They’re all recorded in high quality video and can be downloaded in multiple formats. You can access the full list here. Somewhere along the line (I’m not sure exactly when), Yale made these courses available on a dedicated YouTube channel, which means that you have another way to access these fine offerings. Above, I’ve featured a lecture on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from a course called “The American Novel Since 1945.” You can find all of these Yale courses in our Free University Course collection. And, I’ve added the Yale YouTube channel to our list called Intelligent YouTube Collections.
I wanted to give everyone a heads up that Yale has just released its second round of “open courses.” And I have to say that the lineup looks great. Let me quickly list them for you:
As always, each course features a syllabus, reading assignments, class notes, and quite polished lectures. The lectures can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the courses to be platform agnostic, meaning that you should be able to download the lectures to any computer or mp3 player. For more on Yale’s Open Course initiative, please visit its official website here. And please note that you can also find these courses in our larger collection of Free Online Courses.
Last week, the launch of Stanford Engineering Everywhere, featuring 10 free computer science and engineering courses, got no shortage of buzz on the net. This led me to think, why not highlight other major collections of free university courses/resources. As you’ll see, each collection offers countless hours of free, high quality content. Download the audio and video to your iPod or computer, and you can get lost here for days, weeks, even months. A perfect way to distract yourself on the cheap during the recession. For many more free courses, be sure to see our larger collection of Free Courses, which now includes over 250 free classes from leading universities.
1.UC Berkeley — Stanford’s neighbor to the north makes available a large number of courses online. The collection features lectures taken directly from the undergraduate classroom. And they can be accessed through multiple means — that is, through the web/rss feed, through Berkeley’s iTunesU site, and via YouTube. Overall, this is probably the deepest collection of free academic content out there. And here you’ll find one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents, taught by Richard Muller. You can download the course in audio (iTunes — Feed — MP3s) or watch it in video here.
2.Yale — Last fall, Yale launched an open course initiative known as Open Yale Courses. The university initially came out of the gate with seven courses, and it plans to release another eight this fall. As you will see, Yale’s project is high-touch. Each course features a syllabus, reading assignments, class notes, and polished lectures, which, when taken together, contribute to a well-rounded learning experience. The lectures can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the courses to be downloaded fairly easily, which means that you can put the lectures onto an mp3 player, even if you’re only a little tech savvy. Here’s a list of the course titles that you will find: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Modern Poetry, Death, Fundamentals of Physics, Introduction to Political Philosophy, Introduction to Psychology, and Introduction to the Old Testament.
3. MIT — By now, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project is no secret. Leading the open course charge, MIT has put online materials from 1,800 courses, including syllabi, reading lists, course notes, assignments, etc. If there was a downside to the MIT initiative, it was that it originally lacked audio and video lectures. These days, however, MIT has started to fill that gap by adding audio and video components to a number of courses, including Walter Lewin’s very popular and publicized course, Classical Mechanics. Download the course lectures in video via iTunes or in various formats here.
We’ve integrated all of these courses into our own meta list of Free Courses from leading universities. It now includes roughly 250 courses, and we’d encourage you to bookmark the page and use it often. Enjoy.
Yesterday, Yale announced that it is providing “free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.” I’ve listed the course lineup below, with links to each course. You can access the homepage for the project here.
With this launch, Yale becomes the latest prestigious American university to give global users access to online educational content. But its approach is rather different. The high profile initiatives led by MIT and UC Berkeley both deliver high volumes of content, and they’re designed to be scalable. (MIT gives users access to mass quantities of course materials created by its faculty, while Berkeley distributes through iTunes and YouTube over 50 courses that the university records at a reasonable cost.) In contrast, Yale’s project is more boutique and high-touch.
Each course features a syllabus, reading assignments, class notes, and polished lectures, which, when taken together, contribute to a more rounded learning experience. The lectures can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the courses to be downloaded fairly easily, which means that you can put the lectures onto an mp3 player if you’re a little tech savvy. This does raise the question, however: why aren’t the lectures also posted on Yale’s iTunes site? This would surely facilitate the downloading of lectures for many users, and it would offer an easy way to drive substantial traffic to the courses.
As some have already noted (see the comments on this page), Yale isn’t offering online courses in the truest sense, meaning you won’t get access to a live instructor here. Nor will you be able to interact with other students. It’s a one-way, solitary educational experience. But there’s a reason for that. Not long ago, Yale experimented with a more comprehensive form of online learning when it created, along with Stanford and Oxford, an e‑learning consortium called “The Alliance for Lifelong Learning” (a/k/a AllLearn). For many reasons, the venture (where I spent five years) wasn’t ultimatley viable. And so Yale has opted for another model that has its own virtues — it’s less capital intensive; it’s free (AllLearn charged for its courses); and it will get educational materials into far more people’s hands, which is perhaps what matters most.
As a quick note, let me add that this project was funded by the Hewlett Foundation, and Yale expects to add up to 30 additional courses over the next several years.
To visit Yale’s open courses, visit the following links:
As part of its 300th anniversary celebration, Yale University gathered together some of its foremost faculty and offered an extended series of lectures on the state of American democracy. Collectively entitled “Democratic Vistas,” this wide-ranging series explores American democracy in historical and contemporary terms and looks at how it meshes with other fixtures of our social life — religion, family, economic markets, technological innovation, etc. From this page, you can access all of the illuminating presentations in audio and video, including those by Yale’s President Richard Levin and Richard Brodhead, the former Dean of Yale College and now President of Duke University.
The one caveat worth mentioning is that these talks were recorded not long before 9/11. And, in some respects, this may give the lectures an out-dated feel. Can we really have a valuable discussion about American democracy without addressing 9/11, the war on terror, and the war in Iraq? In some ways no, but in many ways yes. America is still largely America, the same country it was six years ago, and, for the most part, these discerning lectures remain highly relevant today. Indeed, Yale has already uploaded some of them to its new podcast collection on iTunes.
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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.
