Im gonna send you back to schoolin'

February 24, 2007 4:39 PM

The World Lecture Hallis a compedium of links to open university materials. Some include lecture notes, text books and even video. The OCW at MIT is probably the most well known but there are many universities that provide online access to course materials. Want to learn about medicine? John Hopkin's kindly provides some popular courses (Cadaver not included). Notre Dame provides a number of courses focused on the liberal arts. The University of Washington provides Computer Science and Engineering courses. Tufts provides a potpourri of courses, including dentistry.
posted by substrate (13 comments total)

Here's a few more, I didn't want to make the front page post too lengthly.

• Learning Spaces is another aggregator of courses.
• Utah State offers a nice collection.
• Carnegie Mellonsplits between open and free and credit versions.
• Not to be left out, UC Berkeley has a number of lectures on Google and webcasts.

posted by substrate at 4:45 PM on February 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

MIT, as well.
posted by psmealey at 5:14 PM on February 24, 2007

Some Harvard Extension School courses - here.
posted by ericb at 5:31 PM on February 24, 2007

Oops, I missed the OCW link in the FPP above.

Any courses on reading comprehension out there?
posted by psmealey at 5:35 PM on February 24, 2007

What's your phone number? Oh, wait...
posted by Gyan at 5:36 PM on February 24, 2007

Just a small correction: the "medicine?" link for Johns Hopkins in the FPP is actually to the OCW for the university's School of Public Health, not the medical school (which explains the lack of cadavers and such).
posted by sappidus at 6:01 PM on February 24, 2007

Sorry about that, I realized that it wasn't really medical school but I didn't know what to call it. I also figured it could save scarabic an awful lot of work.
posted by substrate at 6:10 PM on February 24, 2007

Neat, thank you.

Lectures are elegant and effective. Whenever I go to a good one, I marvel at how well this mode of communication still works: a person with knowledge or interesting ideas stands in a room, in front of some number of other people, and talks, for a length of time. Despite the far more elaborate methods of communication we've devised, this one still works beautifully.
posted by Miko at 8:38 PM on February 24, 2007

Feynman
posted by hortense at 9:01 PM on February 24, 2007

See also the Independent Scholars Handbook (free PDF hosted by Simon Fraser University)
posted by wenat at 9:26 PM on February 24, 2007

The best lecturers I've had weren't just skilled in the subject, they also had an infectious enthusiasm and a knack for breaking things down into easily understandable concepts. I absolutely hated history until I was forced to take an elective as an example. Prior to that history was all dates and names with no context. This guy didn't care so much about the dates, if you were close that was good enough. What was more important was understanding how events, culture and circumstances led to particular events in history.

I love engineering but I've had classes that were painful to sit through because the professor was just reading from the text book with no additional insight. The exams were just rote memorization as well, which is absolutely not the point of engineering (or science or mathematics or any other subject)
posted by substrate at 10:40 PM on February 24, 2007

A previous post linking to a similar resource.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 3:12 AM on February 25, 2007

This is brilliant. All universities should be doing this. They won't be losing any money; you still have to pay for the degree. In fact, discerning students will be attracted to schools with the best lecture notes. Besides, this is right up Academia's mandate: Sharing knowledge for knowledge' sake.
*Goes off to look up Intro to Neurobiology*
posted by Popular Ethics at 9:04 AM on February 25, 2007