MIT Open Courseware - Free Lectures | Hacker News Reader

MIT Open Courseware - Free Lectures

ocw.mit.edu

39 pointsmacco18 comments

Actually MIT's OCW is pretty popular and many people know about it, but I am sure there are other sites as well which have quality tech education type material, some of the links I use below, What other links do HNers have?Please pass along here and everybody could gain from that

1) MIT -> http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

2) National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning ->http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd

3) Google Tech Talks -> http://www.youtube.com/user/googletechtalks

Stanford has some engineering/comp sci courses available here: http://see.stanford.edu/default.aspx

Berkeley has a lot of lectures available online here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

There's also a lot available in Apple's iTunes U (http://www.apple.com/education/mobile-learning/), although it will require iTunes to be installed to access.

http://AcademicEarth.com is also great

I really love their entrepreneurship talks but they are way too short. I wish someone would upload an entire entrepreneurship class.

I like the lectures on philosophy. Most of the computer science talks are too basic.

http://www.openculture.com/2007/07/freeonlinecourses.html

Yeah your right, I did wonder that it was not mentioned before.

Cool to read about other ways of learning. Thanks for sharing

http://www.khanacademy.org/

I've thought about aggregating all online conference talks, keynotes, workshop,etc videos into one site. Would this be useful to everyone here?

Yes. I would want a site that is better than a basic categorized list. You can have some kind of filtering and recommendation system for content that is interesting to you based on the tagging information and tracking of other people that have similar interests(think netflix). Ideally you should be able to create some kind of playlist of things that you would like to see and add it to that. The site should also track progress. Good luck though, I think it would be a welcome addition to the web.

I'd probably start really simple at first with just organizing the content, which is a big step all by itself. The point would be to get something out that's useful to people. I'd certainly add playlists, favorites, etc. soon thereafter though.

I started down a similar path about 4 years ago with some partners and we created e3f, "education for everyone, everywhere — for free" (http://e3f.com). We were doing it as a side project, and each of us ended up going in a different direction and the project languished.

Would love to talk ideas for starting it up again.

this is really interesting. my hypothesis is this: the resources to learn anything you want, literally anything, exist online. in some cases too many resources exist ie- learn php or rails. Someone needs to organize those sources and the best ones. I was thinking maybe you organize topics into "virtual syllabuses". So say you wanted to learn web dev, you would go to this link for intro to everything, these set of links for RoR stuff, these set of links for mysql, etc. Also keep a list of blogs to continually read to stay up to date. saw youre a bc alum. what year? drop me an email, would love to talk more: j@jasonlbaptiste.com

A dedicated site (rather than personal blogs that are already in place for this purpose) would be great.

At the moment, I keep a Delicious account to index learning material and look for additional content using relevant tags or looking through others' accounts hoping to find other users like myself - time consuming/inefficient task however.

If you've had this idea for some time, I'm just curious as to whether you've thought of a way to search for (& gather) such material.

Gathering content:

- Amazon Turk, while defining the sources yourself. ie- Go and find me a link, description, title, etc. for every presentation for Startup School 2009 - Virtual Assistants - User submitted (submit a talk)

I'd start with one category to start, most likely tech conferences+keynotes. That alone is enough content to get started.

Next, I'd probably move on to a second category: actual school lectures and focus on a few select topics: CS and entrepreneurship. I'd then use mechanical turk to search through the top 100 universities and see if they have online lectures. If it's a yes, id then create another task to index and categorize that content.

Lastly, I'd then go to a third category: Online Screencasts. I'd once again focus on a lot of tech material. Ruby on Rails alone has ~200 screencasts via railcasts.

You could probably accomplish this for about $1000 or less in mturk+virtual assistant fees, along with a lot of hard work yourself organizing from a higher level perspective. You could certainly launch with the first category alone- tech conference talks, keynotes,etc. I'm pretty certain there is video out there to learn anything you want, and it will only keep growing. What would have cost 100k+ in education fees ten years ago is now 100% freely available. Someone just needs to organize the information.

I have lots of other ideas on the topic. Feel free to comment here or each out: j@jasonlbaptiste.com.

very good idea, I was thinking on same lines this morning.Count me in if you need any help building it :-)

hey, can you shoot me an email? j@jasonlbaptiste.com yours isnt listed.

I like this trend, but I have some reservations about the usefulness of the material. It's not generally suited for self studies, as it's made for a full time student and while the lectures and notes are open, the course ware isn't. As far as I know there's no easy way to take an exam or get a grade. It also seems hard for other teachers to use, as it doesn't contain any instructions from that perspective.

So while I like the initiative, I currently can't see any widespread usage for it and think it needs to evolve to become "truly" open.

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