September 01, 2004

MIT's OpenCourseWare: "a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world."

OpenCourseWare offers undergrad and graduate level courses in everything from Aeronautics and Astronautics to Writing and Humanistic Studies. Not degree-granting, but it's free and no registration is required. Some courses available in Spanish and Portuguese. With apologies to Dr. Robotnik. I found it through his earlier post and thought it might be useful for us Monkeys.

  • Ooh, thanks! This is good.
  • This is fantastic, I was looking for something like this but it never occurred to me that MIT would offer it. Thanks so much.
  • Fabulous!!!!! Thanks, shinything! )))
  • shinything, this is wonderful!
  • This is great, but my naive self actually was looking for links to the reading material itself. While I now recognize that would be impossible for many reasons, it was a great fantasy while it lasted.
  • ....not degree-granting... /moves on to something else
  • Well, may be someone find it interesting too: online databases of scientific papers (mostly on computer science finance, sociology/economics and physics/math) Citeseer - the best database I ever saw. Citebase - almost the same as CiteSeer, but smaller. eBizSearch - clone of CiteSeer, but with emphasis on eBiz. IDEAS - emphasis on sociology and economy Arxiv.org - emphasis on math/physics
  • A great place for interest and learning and I'm impressed by how much they have added since I last looked. The folk music course they offer is interesting and I might try to take it (self-motivation not being my strongest suit). I wish that the musical offerings at BerkleeShares were as ambitious. So much potential but they seem to have been stalled.
  • Mind you, there seems to be only one course offered this fall and one upcoming for winter-spring. The individual course pages don't seem to offer much beyond the syllabus and reading lists. No lectures on-line. Bummer. I've found more content, if not courses, via harvard@home.
  • Looks like some courses do have a video lecture or two, but only in RealVirus. Even with just a reading list and some assignments it still seems like a good way to learn more about a given topic. (Good place for used textbooks here. Much better than the other "A".) Thanks for all the great links CocaineTeddyBear and Jerry Garcia!
  • Great links all!! Thanks!
  • Great links all!! Thanks!
  • It's a great idea whose time has come. I've written to the MIT folks suggesting they make it more online, i.e. we web monkeys can take the courses that have already been taught. So much great stuff there! If they could put the lectures on-line either as audio/video or html (this is MIT, after all) it would be wonderful. But I imagine it is a huge headache given intellectual property rights. I'm sure that is why the scope of harvard@home is still quite limited.
  • Well, that's just how much I liked it.......
  • Well, that's just how much I liked it.......
  • shinything, if you're on a PC you can use Real Alternative to avoid the dreaded One. This site has a link to the download as well a discussion of some of the (IMO nit-picky) issues with it.
  • Hmmm. This site has a HTML-newbie look to it, but the music "courses" aren't bad. Not as well presented as Dolmetch, but not bad at all.
  • I can't sing Citeseer's praises loudly enough. It meant a lot to my continuing professional development.
  • Anyone looking for a non-crappy version of Real Player can also get the BBC version of the player. I believe the BBC said, "Give us a decent player to give to our listeners or we're switching." It seems they complied.
  • They may have complied, but I think the BBC are still switching... This is great stuff, btw.
  • There's also the Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie Mellon.
  • Many fine links, Methinks.
  • Bartleby.com - great (well, and also not so great) books online.