Free MIT Course Teaches You to Watch Movies Like a Critic: Watch Lectures from The Film Experience

in Film, Online Courses | April 12th, 2016

We all have our favorite film crit­ics. Maybe we grav­i­tat­ed to them because they write well or because they share our tastes, but the very best of them — the crit­ics we read even on gen­res and direc­tors we oth­er­wise would­n’t care about — make us see movies in a new way. Specif­i­cal­ly, they make us see them the way they do, and the point of view of a pro­fes­sion­al crit­ic steeped in cin­e­ma his­to­ry and the­o­ry (not to men­tion the thou­sands and thou­sands of hours of actu­al film they’ve watched) will always have a rich­ness that the casu­al movie­go­er can’t hope to enjoy on his/her own.

Unless, of course, you take The Film Expe­ri­ence, a 23-lec­ture course from the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. And you don’t need to enroll at MIT — or even show up and sur­rep­ti­tious­ly audit — to take it, since the school has made those lec­tures, their accom­pa­ny­ing mate­ri­als, and even sup­ple­men­tal media (just like the DVD extras that have inspired a gen­er­a­tion of cinephiles) free on their Open­Course­Ware site. They’ve also assem­bled the videos, star­ring MIT’s Film and Media Stud­ies pro­gram found­ing pro­fes­sor David Thor­burn, into a sin­gle Youtube playlist.

Thor­burn’s lec­tures begin with the intro­duc­tion to film as a cul­tur­al form at the top of the post, which itself begins with the ques­tion “What is film?” He then launch­es into a jour­ney through film his­to­ry, from the silent come­dies of Buster Keaton and Char­lie Chap­lin (see also our Keaton and Chap­lin col­lec­tions) to the Hol­ly­wood stu­dio era and Alfred Hitch­cock (for whom we’ve got a col­lec­tion as well) to Amer­i­can film in the 1970s and Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism to François Truf­faut and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. When you come out of the course pos­sess­ing a new­ly height­ened abil­i­ty to decode the lan­guage of film, you may or may not hear the call­ing to become a crit­ic your­self — but at least it’ll make your next trip to the mul­ti­plex more inter­est­ing.

The Film Expe­ri­ence will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

 

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

Take a Free Course on Film Noir; Then Watch Oodles of Free Noir Films Online

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

The Gen­er­al, “Per­haps the Great­est Film Ever Made,” and 20 Oth­er Buster Keaton Clas­sics Free Online

22 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free M.I.T. Course Teaches You How to Become Bill Nye & Make Great Science Videos for YouTube

in MIT, Online Courses, Science, YouTube | March 23rd, 2016

If I had my way, more aca­d­e­mics would care about teach­ing beyond the walls of the acad­e­my. They’d teach to a broad­er pub­lic and con­sid­er ways to make their mate­r­i­al more engag­ing, if not inspir­ing, to new audi­ences. You can find exam­ples out there of teach­ers who are doing it right. The heirs of Carl Sagan–Bri­an Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye–know how to light a spark and make their mate­r­i­al come alive on TV and YouTube. How they do this is not exact­ly a mys­tery, not after M.I.T. post­ed online a course called “Becom­ing the Next Bill Nye: Writ­ing and Host­ing the Edu­ca­tion­al Show.”

Taught at M.I.T. over a month-long peri­od, Becom­ing the Next Bill Nye was designed to teach stu­dents video pro­duc­tion tech­niques that would help them “to engag­ing­ly con­vey [their] pas­sions for sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and/or math.” By the end of the course, they’d know how to script and host a 5‑minute YouTube show.

You can now find the syl­labus and all mate­ri­als for that course online at MIT’s Open­Course­Ware site. This includes all video lec­tures and class assign­ments. Or, if you pre­fer, you can get the video lec­tures straight from this YouTube playlist.

Becom­ing the Next Bill Nye will be added to our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Watch the High­ly-Antic­i­pat­ed Evolution/Creationism Debate: Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy v. Cre­ation­ist Ken Ham

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

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World Science U Lets You Take Free Physics Courses from Leading Minds in the Field

in Online Courses, Science | March 3rd, 2016

Two years ago, World Sci­ence U debuted on the net, promis­ing to bring free sci­ence cours­es to any­one, from high school­ers to retirees. (We wrote about it here.) The cours­es would be taught by the top sci­en­tists in their fields, fea­tur­ing lec­tures, ani­ma­tions, inter­ac­tive exer­cis­es, feed­back, and even vir­tu­al office hours. At the time, how­ev­er, Bri­an Greene’s project to bring the lat­est in research on string the­o­ry, par­ti­cle physics, dark ener­gy, rel­a­tiv­i­ty and more fea­tured only two cours­es.

Since then, World Sci­ence U has tak­en off. It now offers “Sci­ence Unplugged,” a series of short videos that offer answers to layper­son ques­tions about sci­ence; “Mas­ter Class­es” which are short class­es about var­i­ous sub­jects (most­ly in physics) that take a few hours to com­plete; and “Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es” which take eight to ten weeks to com­plete and are designed for the more advanced learn­er. These lat­ter two offer­ings offer cer­tifi­cates upon com­ple­tion.

The cur­rent ros­ter of lec­tures is impres­sive: MIT’s Alan Guth teach­es Infla­tion­ary Cos­mol­o­gy; U. Chicago’s Michael Turn­er (who coined the term “dark ener­gy”) presents the Dark Side of the Uni­verse; Stan­ford’s Andrei Linde takes you into the Mul­ti­verse; and Cal­tech’s Maria Spirop­u­lu probes Nature’s Con­stituents, to name a few Mas­ter Class­es. Mean­while Bri­an Greene cur­rent­ly teach­es two of the uni­ver­si­ty cours­es: “Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: A Math-Based Intro­duc­tion” and (high­light­ed above) “Space, Time and Ein­stein: A Con­cep­tu­al Tour of Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty.”

All of the cours­es are absolute­ly free but the videos are only avail­able if you reg­is­ter with World Sci­ence U.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Bri­an Greene Breaks Down Einstein’s The­o­ry of Grav­i­ta­tion­al Waves for Stephen Col­bert

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Michio Kaku & Bri­an Green Explain String The­o­ry in a Nut­shell: Ele­gant Expla­na­tions of an Ele­gant The­o­ry

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Take a Free Course on Filmmaking Featuring Brian Tufano (Trainspotting), Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) & Other Award-Winning Filmmakers

in Film, Online Courses | February 22nd, 2016

filmmaker course

The UK’s Nation­al Film and Tele­vi­sion School (NFTS) has part­nered with the British Film Insti­tute (BFI) to lift the lid on how to make great films, with a free 6 week course that starts today.

Taught by award-win­ning film­mak­ers from a range of spe­cial­ties, includ­ing Bri­an Tufano and Mike Fig­gis, it cov­ers every­thing from sto­ry­telling, to bud­get­ing, to under­stand­ing the impact of a sound­track.

Here, for instance, is Bri­an Tufano, the estab­lished cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, talk­ing about film­ing the infa­mous toi­let scene in Trainspot­ting — turns out you can do a great deal using half a toi­let and the tech­nique trompe-l’œil (“fool the eye”).

As part of the course, you can also can also watch shorts from recent grad­u­ates of the NFTS (a few of which are already col­lect­ing awards) and get rec­om­mend­ed videos from the Baf­ta Guru col­lec­tion — a site ded­i­cat­ed to get­ting new blood into the indus­try.

The free course, Explore Film­mak­ing, is offered through Future­Learn and gives you the chance to trade opin­ions with thou­sands of oth­er film buffs online, plus get com­ments as the weeks go by from the film­mak­ers teach­ing the course.

Here’s the break­down of what the course cov­ers:

1 — Intro­duc­tion: how does a film get from script to screen?

Nik Pow­ell, direc­tor of the NFTS and pro­duc­er of more than 40 films, includ­ing The Cry­ing Game, Mona Lisa and Com­pa­ny of Wolves.

2 — Sto­ry­telling: what’s the dif­fer­ence between plot and theme?

Des­tiny Ekhara­ga, direc­tor of Gone Too Far.

3 — Deci­sions: how to choose bud­get, sched­ule, loca­tion and kit?

Mike Fig­gis, direc­tor of Leav­ing Las Vegas, Time­Code and Inter­nal Affairs.

4 — The scene: how does a direc­tor make choic­es on set?

Corin Hardy, direc­tor of The Hal­low, recent­ly announced direc­tor of a re-make of The Crow, and direc­tor of music videos for artists such as The Prodi­gy, Olly Murrs and Devlin.

5 — Time and space: how does edit­ing affect mean­ing?

Jus­tine Wright, edi­tor of Touch­ing the Void, The Iron Lady and Locke.

6 — Sound and music: what is the impact of a film’s sound­track?

Dan­ny Ham­brook, sound design­er of Curse of the Were-Rab­bit and Le Week­end, pro­duc­tion sound mix­er on Rush.

In short — there will be no more excus­es for wrong­ly ori­en­tat­ed iPhone videos. Oh and please don’t for­get to namecheck Open Cul­ture and Future­Learn in your Oscar accep­tance speech.

You can join the course for free today.

Jess Weeks is a copy­writer at Future­Learn. Along with the rest of the Future­Learn team, she’s based in the British Library in Lon­don. Yes, it is occa­sion­al­ly like Har­ry Pot­ter.

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Take a Free Online Course on Making Animations from Pixar & Khan Academy

in Animation, How to Learn for Free, Online Courses | February 11th, 2016

It’s a good month for nur­tur­ing your cre­ativ­i­ty: the Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts just launched a free course on mak­ing comics. And now comes anoth­er free course that will teach you the basics of ani­ma­tion. Pixar and Khan Acad­e­my have teamed up to cre­ate “Pixar in a Box,” a free online cur­ricu­lum that shows how Pixar artists use com­put­er sci­ence and math con­cepts to cre­ate their inno­v­a­tive films. Top­ic include Rig­ging (how char­ac­ters are brought to life with con­trols), Ren­der­ing (how pix­els are paint­ed using alge­bra ), Char­ac­ter Mod­el­ing (how clay mod­els are trans­formed into dig­i­tal char­ac­ters using weight­ed aver­ages) and more. Enter the self-paced series of lessons, each filled with instruc­tive videos, here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Make

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Sto­ry­telling … Makes for an Addic­tive Par­lor Game

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Com­ic Books, Com­pli­ments of the Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts

Lyn­da Barry’s Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her New UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

1150 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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The Society of Mind: A Free Online Course from Marvin Minsky, Pioneer of Artificial Intelligence

in Computer Science, Online Courses | January 27th, 2016

This past week­end, Mar­vin Minksy, one of the found­ing fathers of com­put­er sci­ence, passed away at the age of 88. Edu­cat­ed at Har­vard and Prince­ton, The MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review recalls, “Min­sky believed that the human mind was fun­da­men­tal­ly no dif­fer­ent than a com­put­er, and he chose to focus on engi­neer­ing intel­li­gent machines, first at Lin­coln Lab, and then lat­er as a pro­fes­sor at MIT, where he cofound­ed the Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Lab in 1959 with anoth­er pio­neer of the field, John McCarthy.” Dur­ing the 1980s, Min­sky pub­lished The Soci­ety of Mind, a sem­i­nal work which posit­ed that there’s no essen­tial dif­fer­ence between humans and machines, because humans are “actu­al­ly machines of a kind whose brains are made up of many semi­au­tonomous but unin­tel­li­gent ‘agents’.” (Quote comes from this NYTimes obit, not Min­sky direct­ly).

Above, you can watch The Soci­ety of Mind taught as a free online course. Pre­sent­ed at MIT in 2011, Min­sky takes you through his the­o­ries about how the human mind works, empha­siz­ing “aspects of think­ing that are so poor­ly under­stood that they are still con­sid­ered to be more philo­soph­i­cal than sci­en­tif­ic.” The goal, how­ev­er, is to “replace ill-defined folk the­o­ries of ‘con­scious­ness’, ‘self’ and ’emo­tion’ with more con­crete com­pu­ta­tion­al con­cepts.” Lec­tures in the course include ones intrigu­ing­ly called “Falling in Love,” “From Pan­ic to Suf­fer­ing,” and “Com­mon Sense.” In addi­tion to The Soci­ety of Mind, the course also cen­ters around anoth­er book by Min­sky, The Emo­tion Machine, which you can pur­chase online here.

Min­sky’s course will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. His book, The Emo­tion Machine, can be found in our oth­er col­lec­tion: 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

via Boing Boing/O’Reil­ly Radar

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Harvard’s Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Course Teach­es You to Code in 12 Weeks

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Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone, eReader with Free eBooks, Audio Books, Online Courses & More

in Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Film, Online Courses | December 25th, 2015

ipadgift

San­ta left a new Kin­dle, iPad, Kin­dle Fire 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 right on a 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 800 great works by some clas­sic writ­ers (Dick­ens, Dos­to­evsky, Austen, Shake­speare and Tol­stoy) and con­tem­po­rary writ­ers (Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asi­mov, and Kurt Von­negut). The col­lec­tion also gives you access to the 51-vol­ume Har­vard Clas­sics.

If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the down­load process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kin­dle and Nook users will gen­er­al­ly want to click the “Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats links” to down­load ebook files, but we’d sug­gest watch­ing these instruc­tion­al videos (Kin­dle – Nook) before­hand.

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 — 700 works in total — includ­ing texts 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 gad­gets, then lis­ten as you go.

[Note: If you’re look­ing for a con­tem­po­rary book, you can down­load one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audi­ble’s no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Online Cours­es: This list brings togeth­er over 1150 free online 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, busi­ness, and beyond. Most all of these cours­es are avail­able in audio, and rough­ly 75% are avail­able in video. You can’t receive cred­its or cer­tifi­cates for these cours­es (click here for cours­es that do offer cer­tifi­cates). But the amount of per­son­al enrich­ment you will derive is immea­sur­able.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 725 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 and more) 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 New Year’s res­o­lu­tions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 46 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 200 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.…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Learn to Code with Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science Course: The 2015 Edition

in Computer Science, Online Courses | December 2nd, 2015

Briefly not­ed: This fall, Har­vard has been rolling out videos from the 2015 edi­tion of Com­put­er Sci­ence 50 (CS50), the uni­ver­si­ty’s intro­duc­to­ry cod­ing course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a peren­ni­al­ly pop­u­lar pro­fes­sor (you’ll imme­di­ate­ly see why), the one-semes­ter course (taught most­ly in C) com­bines cours­es typ­i­cal­ly known else­where as “CS1” and “CS2.”

Even if you’re not a Har­vard stu­dent, you’re wel­come to fol­low CS50 online by head­ing over to the This is CS50 web­site, or this alter­na­tive site here. There you will find video lec­tures (stream them all above or access them indi­vid­u­al­ly here), prob­lem sets, quizzes, and oth­er use­ful course mate­ri­als. Once you’ve mas­tered the mate­r­i­al cov­ered in CS50, you can start branch­ing out into new areas of cod­ing by perus­ing our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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