If you experienced the heyday of Saturday Night Live, you’ll almost certainly remember Father Guido Sarducci, the chain-smoking, sunglass-wearing priest who worked (rather implausibly) as a rock critic for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

Cartoonist Lynda Barry, who has helped legions of adults grope their way back to the unselfconscious creativity of childhood, is teaching at the university level. Barry’s Unthinkable Mind course is designed to appeal to students of the humanities.

As a new-ish parent, I’ve been inundated with alphabet books from well-meaning friends and family, and I am most grateful for them all. But I’m especially glad for a set that uses images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to illustrate each letter. My daughter gets lost in the paintings, prints, etchings, etc., and you know what? So do I.

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.

Sometimes a tune lives in your head and you hum it now and again without any recollection of where it originally came from. Chances are, if you grew up in the United States watching Saturday morning cartoons, that tune came from Schoolhouse Rock.
Like so many of its biggest fans, Schoolhouse Rock is now officially in its 40s.

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.

We got busy during the Thanksgiving holiday and put together a long-planned collection of free educational resources for K-12 students and their parents and teachers. We’re just getting started with the list, and we’re hoping you could help make it better with your own suggestions.

Non-profit Khan Academy, an organization dedicated to “providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere,” does so primarily through online video courses and lectures.

E + ducere: “To lead or draw out.” The etymological Latin roots of “education.” According to a former Jesuit professor of mine, the fundamental sense of the word is to draw others out of “darkness,” into a “more magnanimous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide).

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.