Free Online Courses from Top Universities
openculture.com
openculture.com
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative
https://online.stanford.edu/courses (This one is kind of but not entirely just an edX front-end now.)
Berkeley used to have a treasure trove of free lectures, but then they got sued because they didn't have subtitles, and so took them down. lbry archived most of them:
https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued
I know there are dozens more but I think of Coursera - Udacity - EdX as the big 3.
Okay, counter-point: in my experience Udacity has the highest quality content on the toughest technical subjects. To me, it is evident that an enormous amount of work has gone into making the lectures and exercises effective.
Coursera has more courses, and the quality varies more but some of them are excellent. In any case, Coursera lectures come from university partners we are all familiar with, so people can decide if they like the Andrew Ng Machine Learning Class or Geoff Hinton on Neural Networks.
I am not affiliated with either of them.
Brilliant as a researcher, not so brilliant as a teacher.
edit It seems like most of these started with quality free courses, but later more and more the courses are changed to be a teaser trying to sell an expensive university course (at least expensive compared to the cost of many European universities)
I was not familiar with futurelearn so I will check it out.
I like to see materials you simply could not learn anywhere else like this: "Intellectual Property Management in the Food Sector: Safeguarding Your Trademarks in the Global Marketplace"
(Also, I thought the quality of the Udacity courses was mixed - there was one on robotics that had quite nice content, but horrible Python implementations one had to work with.)
If you, like me, are wondering what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/courseguides
I use that to navigate to whatever course I want in EECS. Personally I found them higher in quality compared to most of edX.
I found a dead course link: https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7b...
And a course duplicated 3 times on https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d0...: Computers, Waves, Simulations: A Practical Introduction to Numerical Methods using Python
Hopefully, some fellow HNers might find this an interesting project to hack on and make it better. :-)
For example all the iTunes audio courses say "This course material is only available in the iTunes U app on iPhone or iPad" so limited as to whom can access.
Surely they realize that not everyone uses iTunes, and putting the content in a walled garden would not make it as available as putting it in a downloadable, open format on archive.org? Or do they just not care?
Here is an unfortunate example from not too long ago. http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw
I don't think these videos can be played any more.
Unfortunately, my concern is that if my son doesn't follow the status quo then that will leave him at a disadvantage in the job market. As an employer myself though, I interview a huge number of people who have degrees and who aren't really that capable, so it is very difficult to determine quality.
I think most university tutors would find this an insulting caricature of what they and their students do. Is this what you actually think happens at university?
In all in-person large schools, lecture to passive students runs 90% of classes. The essential problem is, any class with more than about 30 students is too big to enable interaction from students. That means only maybe 10% of senior / grad classes even might break the mold of "shut up and sit there while I talk".
In-person small colleges have it better. Few courses there exceed 50 students. But more and more courses there are taught by journeyman profs, which causes instructional quality to vary from year to year.
However MOOCs aren't necessarily any better. Due to their remote delivery and being recorded, all human contact is lost aside from a few text messages to TAs (if you pay). In many, even grading is often automated.
In short, I agree with the sentiment that post-secondary education MUST change. But as they stand now, MOOCs are not the answer. (Other than significantly reducing tuition, which is no small achievement of course.)
Because the higher the score they get in a high stakes test that everyone cares about and everyone knows everyone cares about the higher the floor is on their ranking by some weighted (intelligence x conscientiousness) score. And that score can be conveyed unambiguously in seconds. The same cannot be said for a holistic evaluation of someone’s skills, talents and capabilities.
A test score gives you most of the value of a holistic evaluation in far less time.
Lectures and readings are great, but it's a far cry from learning what the material really means without the discussion section. MOOCs are good for learning facts-and-figures type things, and it's an OK way to learn the tools of the trade (including the trade of programming). But the thing that makes a top university really "top" is the interaction, challenging your thinking and learning to read and understand closely, not just study a craft.
I'm very excited by what they're doing at Signum University[1], which is working on college-level classes without the overhead of a campus. It's not free; you can't really teach an in-depth education for free. But the direction it's going, you'll be able to get all the things that we prize about a four-year college (the things that many employers consider more valuable than somebody who studied at a place like Devry).
I recommend checking out class-central.com, one of the first MOOC aggregators, for an updated collection.
A professor who is, say, in an economics department is a person whose opinions on economics have some value. Of course people build up different reputations over time so YMMV, but I'm personally interested in reflecting on what Schiller has to say about the subject.
George Bernard Shaw
Shiller is well known, but many of the courses in economics are by professors that are not well known from lesser universities.
It's the top 7th ranked CS program in the world too.
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-alg...