50+ Free Courses from UC Berkeley on iTunes

This is noth­ing short of impres­sive. Last April, UC Berke­ley, one of the pre­miere uni­ver­si­ties in the coun­try, announced its plan to put com­plete aca­d­e­m­ic cours­es on iTunes. Fast for­ward nine months, and you can already find 59 full cours­es avail­able as pod­casts. Sim­ply click here to access Berke­ley’s iTunes site (or here for the Rss feed).No mat­ter where you live, you can access at no cost the very same cours­es attend­ed by stu­dents pay­ing full tuition. And, giv­en the crit­i­cal mass of cours­es being offered across a range of dis­ci­plines, you can put togeth­er your own per­son­al­ized cur­ricu­lum and expand your hori­zons on the fly.

If the human­i­ties are your thing, you can take US His­to­ry: From Civ­il War to Present, Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture & Film, or Euro­pean Civ­i­liza­tion from the Renais­sance to Present. If you’re into the social sci­ences, you may want to con­sid­er World Reli­gions, Peo­ples and States, US For­eign Pol­i­cy after 9/11, Human Emo­tions, or Intro­duc­tion to Sta­tis­tics. Turn­ing to the hard sci­ences, you can take your pick from Physics for Future Pres­i­dents, Intro­duc­tion to Chem­istry, Gen­er­al Astron­o­my, and Gen­er­al Biol­o­gy. Final­ly, for those with a tech­nol­o­gy bent, you can con­sid­er lis­ten­ing in on An Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­ers, The His­to­ry of Infor­ma­tion or even The Foun­da­tions of Amer­i­can Cyber­Cul­ture. But, if these par­tic­u­lar cours­es aren’t for you, there are many more to choose from.

Berke­ley’s col­lec­tion has gen­er­al­ly remained off of peo­ple’s radar screen, which is too bad. It’s an excel­lent pod­cast col­lec­tion, one of the best out there. Hope­ful­ly we can help read­ers find out what they are miss­ing.

For more, please see our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties.