• Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) – Download Course – Christine Hayes, Yale.
• Introduction to New Testament History and Literature - YouTube - iTunes - Download Course - Professor Dale B. Martin, Yale

Note: Unlike most Open Yale courses, the Old Testament course is not available via YouTube and iTunes. But you can download the course in multiple formats (including audio and video) from the Yale site.

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The Historical Jesus on Your iPod

Faith and Globalization: Tony Blair Teaches at Yale

Introduction to the New and Old Testaments is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Robert Shiller, who predicted the stock market crash earlier this decade and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, has a unique understanding of the financial markets and behavioral economics. In this free course provided by Yale University, Shiller demystifies the financial markets and explains “the theory of finance and its relation to the history, the strengths and imperfections of such institutions as banking, insurance, securities, futures, and other derivatives markets, and the future of these institutions over the next century.” It’s a course for our shaky financial times. The first lecture appears above, and the full course can be accessed on YouTube, iTunes and Yale’s web site. The course is also listed in our meta collection of Free Courses and our targeted selection of Free Economics Courses.

Understanding Financial Markets is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

After he left office in 2007, Tony Blair went across the pond and spent time teaching at Yale. Exit Prime Minister Blair. Enter Professor Blair. During the 2008-09 academic year, Blair and Miroslav Volf co-taught “Faith and Globalization,” a course designed to help students understand the two intertwined forces shaping our world. In some ways, religion is the real focus here, and it is Blair’s argument (above, for example) that “If you cannot understand the world of faith, whether you are in business, or in public affairs, or in politics, then you actually cannot understand the world.” The full course can be accessed on Yale’s YouTube Channel, and we have also added it to our large collection of free courses from top universities. (Just look under the Politics and Religion sections.) For more information on this course, please visit Yale’s Faith and Globalization website and also be sure to access Yale’s Open Course initiative.

Faith and Globalization: Tony Blair Teaches at Yale is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

The talk above is the first of 26 lectures making up a free Yale course called “The American Novel Since 1945.” Taught by Amy Hungerford, the course introduces you to the novels of America’s finest post-war writers -- Nabokov (émigré), Salinger, Kerouac, and Pynchon, and also Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer. You can watch all lectures via YouTube here, or access them in audio and video from iTunes. Yale also offers the files as mp3s/movs here. For more full-fledged courses from other top universities (including many others from Yale), visit our collection of Free Online Courses whenever you want, wherever you want.

Contemporary American Literature: An Open Yale Course is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

• Dante in Translation – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Giuseppe Mazzotta
• European Civilization, 1648-1945 - iTunes – YouTube – Download Course - Professor John Merriman
• Freshman Organic Chemistry – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course - Professor J. Michael McBride
• Global Problems of Population Growth – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course - Professor Robert Wyman
• Introduction to New Testament History and Literature – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Professor Dale B. Martin
• Introduction to Theory of Literature – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Professor Paul H. Fry
• Listening to Music – Download Course – Professor Craig Wright
• Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Professor Stephen C. Stearns
• The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food – Download Course – Professor Kelly D. Brownell
• Roman Architecture – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Diana E. E. Kleiner

Yale Adds New Batch of Free Open Courses is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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.

Freud in One Yale Hour is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Yale Open Courses Now on iTunesU is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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.

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Kerouac’s “On the Road” Turns 50

Yale Courses on YouTube is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

• The American Novel Since 1945 (Amy Hungerford)
• Introduction to Greek History (Donald Kagan)
• Game Theory (Ben Polak)
• Financial Markets (Robert Shiller)
• Milton (John Rogers)
• France Since 1871 (John Merriman)
• The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (David Blight)
• Fundamentals of Physics (Ramamurti Shankar)
• Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering (W. Mark Saltzman)

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.

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Yale Open Courses: The New Lineup is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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