Recent­ly, Time Mag­a­zine ran a piece called “Log­ging On to the Ivy League” that tells a sto­ry we’re all famil­iar with here — many major uni­ver­si­ties are now record­ing cours­es and mak­ing them freely avail­able online. (See our full list of cours­es here.) Some­what iron­i­cal­ly, the arti­cle most­ly fea­tures cours­es from non ivy league uni­ver­si­ties (Berke­ley, Stan­ford, MIT, etc.) But maybe I’m being too picky in men­tion­ing that. Per­haps I should sim­ply tell you what cours­es Time likes best. (These are high­light­ed in the print edi­tion.) First up: the often-men­tioned physics cours­es taught by MIT’s Wal­ter Lewin (more on that here). Next, Mar­tin Lewis’ course, The Geog­ra­phy of US Elec­tions, which comes out of Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies (my day job). Loy­al read­ers will remem­ber that we fea­tured Lewis’ course on Open Cul­ture last fall. And then there’s Mar­i­an Dia­mond’s Human Anato­my course. We’ve post­ed the first lec­ture of this pop­u­lar UC Berke­ley course above. You can access the com­plete course via these links: iTunes — Feed — YouTube. Enjoy.

The folks at universitiesandcolleges.org have pro­vid­ed a very handy resource here. They’ve  sift­ed through the big Open­Course­Ware uni­verse and cen­tral­ized the resources for over 500 col­lege cours­es. In some cas­es, you’ll find audio lec­tures. In oth­er cas­es, you’ll find lec­ture notes, read­ing lists, and home­work assign­ments. This mega list makes it easy to browse through the dif­fer­ent resources with­out hav­ing to skip from one Open­Course­Ware web site to anoth­er. The page must have tak­en quite some time to put togeth­er. Very glad that they did it.

As a last note, the U&C folks were kind enough to include our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es on their list. Here, you get audio (and some­times video) lec­tures from over 200 cours­es. Sim­ply down­load them to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er, and you’ll be trans­port­ed right to the class­room of many fine uni­ver­si­ties across the world.