cosmolearning

November 7, 2009 7:45 PM

cosmolearning has a ton of college courses and documentaries aggregated in one place. And it was started by a couple of teenagers. I'm impressed.
posted by pahool (8 comments total)

This is pretty awesome. Thanks for posting.

I love that it has a huge history section, that is the one subject where I can tolerate a college course just for the sake of learning.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 8:45 PM on November 7, 2009

Unfortunately they don't have audio files. I currently listen to Teaching Company courses while I'm cycling but it looks like I'm going to have to go through some gymnastics to get mp3s out of these.
posted by pahool at 9:00 PM on November 7, 2009

These aggregation sites irk me as they tend have quality problems. Missing course segments, poor quality media transfer etc.. your better off finding what's available, then go to the source site for the content. For example pahool can't find audio files - for the Yale Open Courses, they do in fact have audio files available - but cosmolearning didn't copy them over.
posted by stbalbach at 9:56 PM on November 7, 2009

Beyond awesome. I will have to watch all of these and come back in a few years.
posted by rainy at 10:36 PM on November 7, 2009

I'll be honest - the quality control isn't that great. Most of the economics section are monetary quakery sort of documentaries, but thanks to this site, I finally found John Kenneth Gailbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty".

Not that I agree with him but I've seen good chunks of his documentary before (the only way I could see it was that my school happened to have an old VHS copy ripped on DVD, and I remember spending the night before my graduation watching as many as I could because otherwise, it was damn near impossible to find a copy).

But yeah, this site as totally made my day.
posted by champthom at 10:51 PM on November 7, 2009

There seems to be an awful lot of noise on this site - the "political science" section seems to be mostly crazy conspiracy theory stuff and lectures from John Birch Society members, and the "art" section is just a bunch of crappy youtube how-to videos from random people. All in all, this site is less useful and harder to navigate than a Google search.
posted by freshwater_pr0n at 8:31 AM on November 8, 2009

Also, some philosophical issues with their setup. They have things like "art" and "film" as extracurricular. As a Film Professor, I'd have to argue that people getting advanced college degrees in film are hardly doing so as a hobby. Film, art, dance and the like are most certainly academic subjects.
posted by MythMaker at 1:04 PM on November 8, 2009

I agree with the criticism. They need better quality control. I'm just glad to see a fairly easily-navigable site that's aggregating e-learning content. Are there any other good aggregation sites out there?
posted by pahool at 10:48 PM on November 8, 2009