I love to learn. This may be obvious if one considers that I chose Librarian as a profession. I also love the internet. I think lolcats are hilarious, I use a feed reader to read more blogs than reasonable, and my delicious links are precious to me. When learning and the internet are combined, I, and librarians the world over, salivate and take note. Lately, I’ve been salivating over and exploring the many free college courses, offered by some of the best universities in the country, anyone can take via the internet. You do not have to be enrolled or affiliated in any way with the university. In fact, none of these websites even require you to sign up for some sort of free account. Merely click the link to the course and let the learning commence. Right now I’m taking an introductory computer science course at Harvard and next semester I’m considering taking “Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher” at MIT, and all I had to do was point and click.
Austin Public Library’s Education and Training Research Guide
Scroll down to Online Education and Training: Free Classes and Tutorials to see a more comprehensive list of free classes on the internet.
These are not necessarily courses, but it is a large collection of lectures and videos by "intellectuals".
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative
Harvard*
* You have to utilize Google to find Harvard classes – they are not all in one place. Often instructors establish their own course websites. For example, I googled “harvard computer science courses”, browsed the results, and then found a class I was interested in.
Internet Archive’s Open Educational Resources
Links to many free university-level lectures and courses.
Lecturefox: Free University Lectures
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2 comments:
You might also be interested in OER Commons, where you can search thousands of resources (from dozens of sources) that are free and open for people to use. There are entire textbooks that are online to use (and reuse/remix) for free, complete courses for high school students, and more.
This is very cool! Thanks!
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