In this followup post, I want to share some additional free e-learning sites I’ve found on the Web. Some, like MIT, are standalone university sites, while others function more as course directories or repositories.
Stanford Continuing Studies offers a broad range of courses in Liberal Arts & Sciences, Creative Writing, and Professional & Personal Development. Courses are primarily taught by Stanford instructors and are open (free) to everyone. Stanford runs another site called Open Culture that tracks free online educational and cultural media. Lots of good links to education and language resources.
Visit Harvard@home and “experience some of the exciting research, teaching, and public addresses making news at Harvard University today — right from your desktop.” Harvard’s offerings are limited to about 60 topics and somewhat dated, but use lots of multimedia and are interesting from a teaching perspective.
Webcast.berkeley is a treasure chest of current and archived courses at UC Berkeley, offered in podcast and/or video format. Heavy on math and science, but I found some interesting courses in Japanese language and literature.
YouTube users may recognize the screenshot at the top of this post. It is a sliding menu of universities that provide content via the relatively new YouTube EDU channel. Once at the site, click an icon to see what each school offers. Or, choose Education from the site’s left navigation bar and you are presented with this month’s most viewed videos. Refine your search using the ‘Search YouTube EDU’ box.
Another hip e-learning site offering loads of free content (over 100,000 educational audio and video files) is Apple’s iTunes U. You’ll need iTunes installed on your computer to access it, but if you have an iPod or iPhone you can download lessons and take them with you. This is a fantastic resource. The video clip below should get you up and running with iTunes U in no time. Enjoy!