Open Culture » MIT

The Top Five Collections of Free University Courses

Dan Colman — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:01:51 +0000

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.

4. Indian Institutes of Technology – In India, there are seven institutes dedicated to training some of the world’s top scientists and engineers, making the country an up and coming world power. They are collectively known as the IITs, or the Indian Institutes of Technology. And now more than 50 IIT courses are being made available in English on YouTube for free. (The main page is here; the courses are actually here.) Some of the titles featured here include: Introduction to Computer Graphics, Core Science Mathematics, Computer Networks, and Introduction To Problem Solving & Programming.

5. Stanford - Yes, last week we mentioned the 10 free courses coming out of the Engineering School. But we should also mention the open course collection maintained by the larger university. Stanford’s iTunes site gives you access to dozens of lectures and lets you download close to 30 courses in their entirety. Clearly, the thinking public loves physics (witness above), and among the Stanford courses you’ll find a multi-course overview of modern physics by Leonard Susskind, who has waged a long-running “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawking (see his new book on that subject here). The lover of the liberal arts will also find some gems, including: The Historical Jesus, History of the International System, Geography of World Cultures, and African American History: The Modern Freedom Struggle. Lastly, I’ll mention that many courses can also be found on Stanford’s YouTube collection in video. Visit 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.

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The Top Five Collections of Free University Courses is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma

Ed Finn — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:09:49 +0000

For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60-80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of the challenges I have to deal with is how to address novels, films, television shows, video games and more as part of the same “list.” How does one put these things together? How can a video game be read as a text alongside Gravity’s Rainbow or Brave New World?

One way to approach this question is to include the work of literary and cultural critics who are already looking at new and traditional media side by side. Following that line, I try to keep up with the academic blog Grand Text Auto, which covers “computer narrative, games, poetry and art.” One of its contributors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is working on a book about digital fictions and computer games that looks perfect for my Orals list—and he’s publishing it, chapter by chapter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.

All fine so far—I could list it as “forthcoming” and direct my professors to the link. But what happens when I start commenting on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowledge that this “text” will most likely change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list signify a draft of the book, the blog and its comments, or the experience of reading and writing into the MS myself (including, perhaps, responses from the author)?

I find the dilemma particularly interesting because it touches on a central conflict in humanities scholarship. Are we passive observers of the literary scene or active participants in it? It’s a rare academic critic who thinks of calling up a poet to ask her what she meant in a particular line, but that’s exactly the kind of connection that our hyper-conscious, digitally mediated world offers up.

P.S. After all of this hand-wringing, it’s obvious I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!

A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel

Ed Finn — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:36:22 +0000

The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling now comes with a lot of cool features: mesh technology so a group of students can share one wifi connection; low power consumption and the ability to recharge batteries with solar cells or even a hand crank; a linux operating system and open source software.

I suspect that last feature is causing the biggest problem for Intel. According to the Times, company sales reps actually tried to persuade several countries to ditch the OLPC in favor of a more expensive machine running Microsoft Windows. I don’t know about you but I have a hard time imagining disadvantaged Peruvian first-graders keeping up with their security updates, troubleshooting the less-than-stellar Windows wifi utility or shelling out for that upgrade to Vista.

Maybe those kids need other things more than they need laptops, but it can’t hurt. In any case it’s hard to believe how badly Intel managed this saga in terms of public relations. Think of the children, guys!

One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: The #2 Podcast on iTunesU

Dan Colman — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 07:53:55 +0000

During a week when university podcasts received widespread attention (thanks to a very popular article in the NY Times), we’ve kept a close eye on the high-ranking podcasts on iTunesU. Quite consistently, one podcast — How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps? — has ranked at the top. It currently sits in the #2 position, right behind What is Existentialism?.

The Hannibal lecture was presented at Stanford by Patrick Hunt, an archaeologist who recently wrote Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History (see related post) and whose long term project is to figure out how the great military leader crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with his large army, which included dozens of war elephants. I had a chance to catch up with Patrick and ask him why, over 2,000 years later, the adventures of Hannibal still manage to capture our imagination. Here is what he had to say:

“Here are some reasons I think the Hannibal topic is mesmerizing. First, the logistics of moving a large army – at least 25,000 surviving soldiers – over sometimes terrifying mountain barriers is very daunting and immensely challenging. Second, this is exponentially compounded by the fact that even with able scouts the increasingly steep terrain and bad weather en route to the summit were threateningly unfamiliar to the vast majority of Hannibal’s army in this early winter of 218 BCE. Even in summer, the weather can be harsh and wildly unpredictable. In winter, it can be that much worse. Third, there were Celtic tribes to contend with, who would roll boulders down on troops and ambush them from ravines. Fourth, we don’t know the exact passage that Hannibal took, and the mystery is like a detective story waiting to be solved once and for all. Fifth, the fact that Hannibal never lost a battle in Italy against larger Roman armies and overwhelming odds adds to his image of being a genius strategist. Last but not least, the 37 or so elephants certainly add an exotic touch: what in the world were large cumbersome tropical animals doing on these tiny trails and how did their handlers persuade them to go on, step by step, over worse and worse rocks slick with icy snow for days on end? The historian Polybius tells us that when the exhausted and depleted army finally descended into Italy, they were utterly worn down, having lost half their soldiers and animals to enemies and the elements. Polybius says they were now more like savage beasts than men. Having conquered the Alps, the remnant, tattered army must have been incredibly tough. How much of a challenge could the Romans present after this terrible experience? Taken together, this is why people find this Hannibal story so compelling. I’m currently finishing a new book on this, and I’m thankful that the National Geographic Society sponsors this Hannibal research.”

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How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: The #2 Podcast on iTunesU is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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MIT & Google for High School Students

Dan Colman — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 17:48:57 +0000

Here’s a quick fyi on two initiatives announced for high school students this past week:

For six years, MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative has done a great job bringing free educational materials to adult learners worldwide. (More on the initiative here.) Now, it has launched a section of its website devoted to high school students and teachers. Here, you’ll find a series of “MIT introductory courses” within 11 major areas of study (e.g. Engineering, Foreign Languages, Math, etc.). Plus, you can access information that supplements AP Biology, Physics and Calculus courses. This is a trove of material that the ambitious student will certainly want to explore.

Next, Google announced its first open source contest for pre-university students. Called the “Google Highly Open Participation Contest” (a bit of a mouthful), it’s intended to “help introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development and to encourage young people through opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.” For more information you can click here and here.

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MIT & Google for High School Students is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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The MIT Lecture Browser & A Beautiful Mind

Dan Colman — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:49:28 +0000

MIT has released a new search engine that draws on speech recognition technology and lets users search MIT audio & video lectures by keyword. For example, if you type “NASA” into the search box, the search results will include all of the instances where a speaker utters the word NASA in a recorded lecture. (You can get more background information on the new search engine here.)

Now, what’s nice about using this example is that a “NASA” search will bring you to an intriguing presentation by Sylvia Nasar. (Click here and type “NASA” or “Sylvia.”) She’s the author of the bestelling book, A Beautiful Mind, which offers a biographical account of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash and his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia. The book was turned into an Academy Award-winning film, and here you can find Nasar delivering a lecture at MIT called “A Beautiful Mind: Genius, Madness, Reawakening.” She’s a very able speaker and tells a good story. Have a look. (You can also access Nasar’s talk here.)

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The MIT Lecture Browser & A Beautiful Mind is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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University Podcasts: The New Video Wave on iTunes

Dan Colman — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:14:52 +0000

When universities first started developing their podcast collections, a good number took their audio archives — the many lectures and talks they had recorded over the years — and uploaded them onto iTunes. Now, months later, some institutions are turning to their video archives. Most notably, MIT has given users access to video podcasts taken from its ambitious OpenCourseWare initiative. (Harvard has done something similar with its series, Harvard@Home, although the collection is considerably smaller.) Moving these videos onto iTunes makes perfect sense. While it’s unlikely that many will watch these videos on their actual iPods, it seems safe to assume that new audiences will get exposed to these collections and be contented with watching these clips on their computers at least, or perhaps on Apple TV down the road. iTunes has become a dynamic marketing/distribution platform, with masses of users flocking to it and discovering new content along the way. For institutions like MIT, shifting content onto iTunes streamlines their efforts to get their content noticed, which makes the project a no-brainer with no downside. For more on the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, click here. For info on the recent integration of iTunes U with iTunes, click here.See our complete University Podcast Collection.

University Podcasts: The New Video Wave on iTunes is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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A Mention in the Christian Science Monitor

Dan Colman — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 08:57:00 +0000

Just a very quick fyi: Open Culture got a nice little mention in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor. It’s within the context of a very good article about MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, which is definitely worth knowing about.

A Mention in the Christian Science Monitor is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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MIT Brings Science & Technology Courses to Your Home

Dan Colman — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Five years ago, MIT launched an ambitious initiative with its OpenCourseWare project. The concept was fairly simple. It involved putting online the materials from MIT courses — the syllabi, reading lists, course notes, assignments, etc. — and making them available online to the world at large. Benefiting from this initiative were students and faculty across the globe, all looking to find guidance on how to teach themselves, or their students, the latest in their particular academic field. By early this year, MIT had online materials for 1,285 courses and was receiving 36,000 daily visits to the OpenCourseWare site. A success by all counts.

If there was a downside to the MIT initiative, it was that the OpenCourseWare materials lacked media elements that really let teachers and students see how a course was taught. It’s one thing to get the course materials, but quite another to see the materials in action. These days, MIT has filled that gap by adding audio and video components to a number of courses. (You can review the full list here.) With this addition, you can now see a variety of MIT courses in action, ranging from biology to physics to genomic medicine to animal behavior. They’re worth a look.

For more online materials from top-notch universities, see our full list. University Online Courses & Online Media.

MIT Brings Science & Technology Courses to Your Home is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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