Then came another piece of news. Apple has released a new iTunesU app that lets students access enhanced university courses … for free. Once you download the app, you can select courses that combine audio/video lectures with supporting materials: books and articles (sometimes free, sometimes not), transcripts of lectures, exercises, slideshows, useful software and beyond. Some courses preloaded in the free app include:

American Revolution – Joanne Freeman, Yale
Colonial and Revolutionary America – Jack Rakove, Stanford
Core Concepts in Chemistry –  Stephen L. Craig, Duke
iPad and iPhone App Development – Paul Hegarty, Stanford

These courses now appear in our collection of 400 Free Online Courses, which aggregates free courses available on iTunes, YouTube, and the web.

Apple Releases Free iTunesU App & Enhanced University Courses (Plus Textbooks) is a post from: Open Culture

Before we rush headlong into a new year, it’s worth pausing, ever so briefly, to consider the ground we covered in 2011. What topics resonated with you … and jazzed us? Today, we’re highlighting 10 thematic areas (and 46 posts) that captured the imagination. Chances are you missed a few gems here. So please join us on our brief journey back into time. Tomorrow, we start looking forward again.

1) Universities Offer More Free Courses, Then Start Pushing Toward Certificates: The year started well enough. Yale released another 10 stellar open courses. (Find them on our list of 400 Free Courses). Then other universities started pushing the envelope on the open course format. This fall, Stanford launched a series of free courses that combined video lectures with more dynamic resources – short quizzes; the ability to pose questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance; a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, etc. A new round of free courses will start in January and February. (Get the full list and enroll here.) Finally, keep your eyes peeled for this: In 2012, MIT will offer similar courses, but with one big difference. Students will get an official certificate at the end of the course, all at a very minimal charge. More details here.

2) Cultural Icons at Occupy Wall Street: OWS was a big national story, and we were always intrigued by its cultural dimension — by the cultural figures who championed the movement. You can revisit performances/speeches by: Philip Glass & Lou Reed; Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie; David Crosby and Graham Nash; Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig; Noam Chomsky; and Slavoj Zizek. Also check out: 8 Lectures from Occupy Harvard and Artistic Posters From Occupy Wall Street.

3) Books Intelligent People Should Read: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list “8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read” ended up generating far more conversation and controversy than we would have expected. (Users have left 83 comments at last count.) No matter what you think of his rationale for choosing these texts, the books make for essential reading, and they’re freely available online.

Tyson’s list dovetails fairly nicely with another list of essential texts — The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume set that’s available online. According to Charles W. Eliot, the legendary Harvard president, if you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading these books, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. And that could partly apply to another list we pulled together: 20 Popular High School Books Available as Free eBooks & Audio Books — the great literary classics taught in classrooms all across America, all free…

4) Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens left us this past month. And, until his last day, Hitchens was the same old Hitch — prolific, incisive, surly and defiant, especially when asked about whether he’d change his position on religion, spirituality and the afterlife. All of this was on display when he spoke at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles last February. We covered his comments in a post called, No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask. And even from the grave, Hitchens did more of the same, forcing us to question the whole modern meaning of Christmas.

During Hitch’s final days, Stephen Fry emceed a large tribute to his friend in London, an event that brought together Richard Dawkins, Christopher Buckley, Salman Rushdie, Lewis Lapham, Martin Amis, poet James Fenton and actor Sean Penn. It’s well worth a watch. But you also shouldn’t miss some other great videos featuring the wisdom of Mr. Fry — his introduction to the strange world of nanoscience, his animated debate on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the Catholic Church, and his thoughtful reflection, What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18.

5) Four for the Fab Four: John, Paul, Ringo and George. We sneak them in whenever we can. A sprinkling here and there. This year, we served up an ever-popular post, Guitarist Randy Bachman Demystifies the Opening Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and a no less popular freebie: Download The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a Free, Interactive eBook. Trailing right behind are two other good Beatles picks: All Together Now: Every Beatles Song Played at Once and The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig.

6) Wisdom from Great Philosophers: Want the chance to take courses from great philosophers? Here’s your opportunity. Our meta post brought together courses/lectures from Bertrand Russell, Michel Foucault, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michael Sandel. You could get lost in this for days. Also while you’re at it, you should check out The History of Philosophy … Without Any Gaps, an ongoing podcast created by Peter Adamson (King’s College London) that moves from the Ancients to the Moderns. Plus we’d encourage you to revisit: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power in 1971.

7) Vintage Film Collections: Scouring the web for vintage films. It’s something we love to do. In 2011, we brought you 22 films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, 32 Film Noir classics, and a series of films by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. All are listed in our big collection of Free Movies Online.

8) Back to the Future: We had fun going back — way back — and seeing how past generations imagined the future. Arthur C. Clarke Predicted the Future in 1964 … And Pretty Much Nailed It. Before that, American fashion designers looked roughly 70 years into the future and guessed how women might dress in Year 2000. Turns out fashion designers aren’t the best futurists. And, even before that (circa 1922), we get to see the world’s first mobile phone in action. Seriously!

9) Animated Films: 2011 started off on exactly the right note. On January 1, we featured Shel Silverstein’s animated version of The Giving Tree. Then some other gems followed: Destino, the Salvador Dalí – Disney collaboration that started in 1946 and finished in 1999; Spike Jonze’s Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company; John Turturro narrating an animated version of Italo Calvino’s fairy tale, “The False Grandmother;” and a series of animated films featuring the voice of Orson Welles. Also let’s not forget these splendid animation concepts for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and, just for good measure, Terry Gilliam’s vintage primer on making your own cut-out animation.

10) New Archives & Art on the Web: Last but not least — 2011′s new archival projects that brought great culture to the web.

• Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paintings & Museums to You
• Royal Society Opens Online Archive; Puts 60,000 Papers Online
• Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Resolution)
• The Smithsonian Launches Wildlife Photo Archive
• Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

And now onward into 2012….

The Best of Open Culture 2011 is a post from: Open Culture

Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 300 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics. Read these foundational texts, and you’ll be well on your way to giving yourself a proper liberal education.

If you need help loading files to your eBook reader, Project Gutenberg provides tutorials here, and one of our previous posts explains how to upload files specifically to your Kindle.

Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your mp3 player, then listen as you go.

[Note: If you're looking for a more recent book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Grab that new Steve Jobs biography, or pretty much any other audio book you want. Find details on Audible's no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Courses: This list brings together over 400 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. All of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 65% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive here is immeasurable.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 435 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.

Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2012 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.

Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.

Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device….

Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Courses & More is a post from: Open Culture

As The New York Times noted in a 2007 profile, Walter Lewin long had a cult following at MIT. But when his free courses went viral on the web (find them in the Physics section of our big collection of Free Online Courses), the physics prof became an “international Internet guru,” the first star of the open course movement. It’s a sign of his stardom that someone made a mashup of Lewin’s “best lines” (drawn, not spoken) from his Classical Mechanics course. For more great physics videos, don’t miss these items:

Richard Feynman’s 1964 Cornell Physics Course Goes Online

Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Inferno Inspired Galileo’s Physics

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Universe From Nothing’

h/t goes to Coudal.com

The Best Lines of Walter Lewin, MIT Physics Prof & Web Star is a post from: Open Culture

It happens at least a few times a day. Students look through our list of 400 Free Online Courses, and ask us whether they can get a certificate for taking a class. And, unfortunately, our answer has been no — no, you can’t. But that may be about to change.

Earlier this fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized series of free courses that offer students something novel: the ability to take tests and receive a “statement of accomplishment” from the instructor — though not the school itself — if they pass the class. (Stanford will launch 14 more courses starting in January and February. Click link for details.)

Now, MIT wants to up the ante on the certification of free courses. Starting next spring, the university, already famous for its OpenCourseWare project, will launch MITx, an e-learning initiative that will offer certificates to students demonstrating mastery of free MIT courses. According to a new set of FAQs, the certificates won’t bear MIT’s name. Rather, “MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within [MITx] that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.” The courses will be free; the certificates will cost just a “modest” sum. It’s all a big step in the right direction.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has more on MITx. Expect a formal announcement from MIT on Monday.

Related Content:

MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

Download The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential (Free eBook)

MIT to Offer Certificates to Students Taking Free Courses on the Web is a post from: Open Culture

Immediately below, you’ll find the latest additions. All of these courses feature interactive video clips; short quizzes that provide instant feedback; the ability to pose high value questions to Stanford instructors; and feedback on your overall performance in the class.

Courses start in January and February. Enroll today for free. And, if something doesn’t pique your interest below, don’t miss our big list of 400 Free Online Courses.

Newly added:

Technology Entrepreneurship
Making Green Buildings
Anatomy
Information Theory
Design and Analysis of Algorithms I
The Lean Launchpad
Cryptography

Originally mentioned:

Computer Science 101
Software Engineering for SaaS
Human Computer Intereaction
Natural Language Processing
Game Theory
Probabilistic Graphical Models
Machine Learning

More Free Courses from Top Universities

Yale Rolls Out 10 New Courses – All Free

MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

Harvard Presents Free Courses with the Open Learning Initiative

Stanford Launching 14 Free Online Courses in January/February: Enroll Today is a post from: Open Culture

David Harvey, an important social theorist and geographer, has got the right idea. Take what you know. Teach it in the classroom. Capture it on video. Then distribute it to the world. Keep it simple, but just do it.

Harvey is now making available 26 hours of lectures, during which he gives a close reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). This work, often considered to be Marx’s masterpiece, is where he elaborated a critique of capitalism and laid the groundwork for an ideology that took the 20th century by storm. Harvey is no stranger to this text. He has taught this class for over 40 years now, both in universities (Johns Hopkins and CUNY) and in the community as well.

The first lecture, preceded by an introductory interview lasting roughly six minutes, appears above. The rest of the lectures can be accessed via Harvey’s web site, YouTube, and iTunes. Also, we have placed the course in our collection of Free Online Courses, which keeps on growing. Find it under the Economics section.

Related Content:

The Crisis of Capitalism Animated (with David Harvey)

Hayek v. Keynes Rap

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey (Free Course) is a post from: Open Culture

This fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized experiment in online learning. The university took three of its most popular computer science courses and made them freely available to the world. Each course features interactive video clips; short quizzes that provide instant feedback; and the ability to pose high value questions to Stanford instructors. The response? It has been nothing short of amazing. One course alone (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) pulled in more than 58,000 enrollments.

Starting in January and February 2012, Stanford will offer seven new courses, and they’re all open for enrollment today. Here’s the new list (and don’t forget to browse through our collection of 400 Free Online Courses):

Computer Science 101
Software Engineering for SaaS
Human Computer Interfaces
Natural Language Processing
Game Theory
Probabilistic Graphical Models
Machine Learning

Another seven courses have recently been added. Find the updated list here.

Related Content:

Create iPhone/iPad Apps in iOS 5 with Free Stanford Course

MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

Stanford Opens Seven New Online Courses for Enrollment (Free) is a post from: Open Culture

You have got to hand it to The Great Courses (sometimes also called The Teaching Company). Based in Chantilly, VA, the company has traveled across America, recording professors lecturing on great topics. They have roughly 350 courses in their catalog, market them aggressively with millions of print materials and emails, and generate $110 million in annual sales. It’s quite an accomplishment, especially given that consumers now have free alternatives — the ability to download 400+ Free Courses recorded by world-class universities.

Free is good. But we readily admit that The Great Courses can be worth the cost, particularly if you buy their courses on sale. The lectures are generally engaging, well polished and certainly informative. And it just so happens that we’ve dug up 10 free lectures sponsored by the company. (Most are individual lectures taken from longer courses available for purchase online.) Give them a try and then decide whether free or paid is the way to go…

• Will China and India Dominate the 21st Century Global Economy - Video - Lee Branstetter, Carnegie Mellon
• Revealing the Dead Sea Scrolls to the World - Video - Gary A. Rendsburg, Rutgers
• Ancient Origins of the Olympic Games - Audio 1 - Audio 2 - Jeremy McInerney, University of Pennsylvania
• The Search for What Killed the Dinosaurs – Audio – Peter Ward, University of Washington
• The Story Behind the D-Day Invasion – Audio - Thomas Childers, University of Pennsylvania
• Optimizing Brain Fitness – Video - Richard Restak, George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences
• Memory and the Brain - Video - Jeanette Norden, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
• Voting: Determining the Will of the People – Video – Scott Stevens, James Madison University
• It’s All About the Calories! - Video - Roberta Anding, Baylor College of Medicine
• Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique – Audio - Robert Greenberg, San Francisco Performances
• Bonus Lecture: Globalization of Capital Flows – Video – Timothy Taylor, Macalester College

Related Content: Don’t forget to visit our collection: Back to School: Free Resources for Lifelong Learners Everywhere

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10 Free Lectures by “The Great Courses” (in a Sea of Free Courses) is a post from: Open Culture

With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially time to head back to school. That applies not just to kids, but to you. No matter what your age, no matter where you live, no matter what your prior level of education, you can continue deepening your knowledge in areas old and new. And it has never been easier. All you need is a computer or smart phone, an internet connection, some free time, and our free educational media collections. They’re available 24/7 and constantly updated:

Free Online Courses: Right now, you can download free courses (some in video, some in audio) created by some of the world’s leading universities — Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT and others. The courses cover pretty much every subject — from philosophy, literature and history, to physics, computer science, engineering and psychology. The collection features about 400 courses in total. And while you can’t take these courses for credit, the amount of personal enrichment offered by these lectures is endless.

Free Textbooks: Another tool for the lifelong learner. This collection brings together roughly 150 free textbooks authored by professors (and some high school teachers) across the globe. The collection will particularly benefit those interested in deepening their knowledge in economics, computer science, mathematics, physics and biology.

Free Language Lessons: Ours is an increasingly globalized world, and it certainly pays to know more than one language. With the free audio lessons listed here, you can learn the basics of Spanish, French and Italian (the languages traditionally taught in American schools). Or you can start boning up on Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages spoken by the new world powers. Taken together, you can Learn 40 Languages for Free.

Free Audio Books: This free collection gives you the ability to download audio versions of important literary works. During your downtime, you can listen to short stories by Isaac Asimov, Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. Or you can settle into longer works by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Friedrich Nietzsche and James Joyce.

Free eBooks: Once again, it’s free literary works. But this time you can download e-texts to your computer or digital reader. Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Gertrude Stein, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust and Kurt Vonnegut. They’re all on the list. And so too are The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series of enduring works.

Great Science Videos: This list pulls together some of our favorite science videos on the web. It features about 125 videos, covering astronomy & space travel, physics, psychology and neuroscience, religion, technology and beyond.

Intelligent YouTube Sites: Have you ever wanted to separate the wheat from the chaff on YouTube? This list will give you a start. It features over 100 YouTube channels that deliver high quality educational content. Along similar lines, you may want to visit our collection of Intelligent Video Sites. Same concept but applied to sites on the web.

Cultural Icons: If you’ve ever wanted to see great thinkers, artists and writers speaking on video in their own words, this list is for you. It has Borges and Bowie, Coltrane and Coppola, Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Edison, among others. 275 cultural icons in total.

Free Movies Online: What better way to get a cultural education than to watch some free cinematic masterpieces, including 15 films with Charlie Chaplin, 22 early films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, and a number of Soviet classics by Andrei Tarkovsky. The list of 400+ films goes on. And so does your cultural education….

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Back to School: Free Resources for Lifelong Learners Everywhere is a post from: Open Culture