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Open Education Resources

mindshift.kqed.org

94 pointsnprincigalli21 comments

I have to admit an interest in this as I work for them, but the Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/) do have quite a lot of material online....

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

http://open.edu/itunes/

http://www.youtube.com/user/oulearn

That is a lot of material. Thanks.

minor grumble: why, why, WHY do so many universities put their content on ItunesU, thus making it all but inaccessible for those of us not already using apple software.

Even dumping a pile of MP3s on a server somewhere would make your material much more accessible.

iTunes U is essentially just a directory service for the convenience of iTunes users.

The actual content is in fact still stored on the school's server, just as you say -- a very common way of populating iTunes U is through RSS feeds from some internal system (not necessarily Apple-based).

If the content is free, there's no reason why they shouldn't make it available through alternate links/feeds. You could try complaining to the person in charge. :-)

Possibly of interest (I haven't tried these myself):

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/tunesviewer-itunes-university-medi...

http://www.fritscher.ch/blog/2009/05/13/browsing-itunesu-wit...

aha! they look very useful (assuming they work). Thanks so much :)

Follow the money...

I can't believe they didn't mention Khan Academy.

They do, first link in the 4th paragraph. Noticed now that Academic Earth ( http://academicearth.org/ ) is missing, tho.

Same for http://videolectures.net/

A high school student I know finds the Khan videos not deep enough. She said they are a good introduction but didn't cover anywhere near what she was seeing in class. So I guess you get what you pay for.

If she just wrote to Salman Khan along with classmates, i am sure he would be happy to cover the missing areas too.

It's just that he chooses areas to cover based on feedback from students/users - and if enough students approach him, the subject gets magically covered.

That was my first thought after reading the article.

A couple of the best resources I know of are actually on Reddit, in sub-reddits dedicated to cataloging freely available textbooks in various fields:

http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/eebooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/physicsbooks

http://www.reddit.com/r/econbooks

And, of course, there is this classic site:

http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...

Pap. If you know Opencourseware exists there are two things worth learning on that page, ck-12 and flat world knowledge make freely downloadable textbooks.

Not worth your time.

Clickables:

http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

That's one lame "Javascript is off" warning, on the former.

Degrade gracefully, and let the client see something of what you have to offer. They might actually decide it's worth their while, and gather sufficient trust, to enable Javascript.

I understand the complaint completely, but be sure to look at it from a cost/benefit viewpoint as well. People with JS off are likely significantly less than 1% of their users. They would likely benefit more from supporting IE6, and maybe IE5, than supporting JS-off.

It's a redirect to a warning page. If you pause the load (Escape key) before the redirect, the initial/front page is plenty visible and ok looking.

I keep JS disabled because there's just too much random/nasty cr*p out there. I'll do JS for some sites, but it's definitely "opt-in", for me.

Yeah, I'm a corner case. I just found the deliberate redirect away from a presentable page (with JS disabled) to a content-devoid warning/advisory, to be rather pointless, from my perspective.

hah, yeah, that's pretty annoying. I prefer un-announced failure to drop-everything-and-berate-user. I didn't realize it was that bad, I retract my earlier remark - this likely cost them additional time to be more annoying (though was probably done for people on ancient browsers, and not voluntary no-JS-ers).

The progress in free education is astounding.

I am testing learnboost.com to manage a class. It works ok. But I have found a couple of wrinkles. I hope it is just a matter of time.

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