1,700 free online courses from top universities | Hacker News Reader

1,700 free online courses from top universities

openculture.com

258 pointsmomentmaker34 comments

The Stanford iTunesU classes have been truncated to a few seconds. So Susanna Braund's Aeneid course (which was brilliant) is gone. Same thing with their Hannibal course. I don't know that they're available elsewhere. Apple dropped iTunesU (2021?) and Stanford didn't have a backup.

Are they not available at archive.org or YouTube ?

They are available on archive.org - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ITunes_U

Thanks. Stanford's archive seems to be one big 296.2G blob. But it's there at least.

https://archive.org/details/stanford_itunesu/

Maybe it's because I'm in the US, but all of those files have been blacklisted for download.

Same in India, this is the first time I am seeing this on Internet Archive

https://openstax.org/higher-education

^^ Good resource for textbooks

I went to that site, said "awesome!", bookmarked it, and left the tab open in the background for an hour or so, and then noticed my laptop was warm.

That page was taking over 6GB

https://www.openculture.com/free_textbooks - none of the free textbooks that i tried worked? i picked a few from the CompSci category

When you say they didn't work, what does that mean? Opened 10-20 and they all opened as a PDF or a webpage(albeit some don't have HTTPS certificates).

I got 404s on some, and then one I recall was a 1-page PDF that had links to buy off amazon >_<

There are so many things I wish I had time to learn about. I don't need my learning resources, I need a way to jack in and have them uploaded to my brain.

This is just an excuse for not learning and getting it done. You do have a way to upload to your brain, it is just a slow bandwidth connection that takes time. If you don't have time you have to make time by not reading the news, not reading social media, not watching stupid videos.

The book Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel is helpful. tl;dr of it is:

- lots of low-stakes quizzing and practice

- spaced repetition

- reflect on what you've learned and what you could do better next time, and apply these lessons in different contexts

- interleave practice of different but related topics

- try to solve a problem before being taught the solution

- distill the underlying principles to different problems

- remember that if learning is easy, you probably aren't engaging you brain very much

This will help streamline the process, but obviously there's just a limit to what you can take in.

All these things presume actual interest and savviness about the topic present in the student beforehand, which is precisely what most students that struggle with studies lack.

Actually, some of the research they base their advice on was performed on elementary school students, and college classrooms which had poor attendance; ie, not the most engaged students. Simple things like giving elementary students an ungraded quiz right before class (to force recall) two or three times a week raised grades substantially, and a college class that switched from midterms/finals to 9 quizzes plus a final not only had higher attendance, but also had much higher grades on their finals with basically none of the students falling behind. Another experiment had young kids practice throwing beans bags into a bucket, one group alternating practice between 2 and 4 feet, and another only practicing at 3 feet. After a month or two, they were tested on throwing the bag into the bucket at 3 feet and the kids who practiced at 2 and 4 feet performed significantly better than the kids who only practiced at 3. Anyway, my point is that small, simple changes to how you study can have big implications for retention, without too much extra effort.

Sorry, I'm still reading this book right now and it's super interesting.

Yes, if you have something like a classroom setting with a teacher who can just tell students to do things, that can serve as an external motivator for students who lack intrinsic motivation otherwise.

But when you just grab a pile of learning resources off the internet, the teacher doesn't come included. You need to be at least motivated enough to become your own teacher, or else find a way to have someone else supervise your self-study.

Not just a limit. Different people have different personalities. And different subjects have specific mechanism required for mastery(eg Surgery vs Philosophy). So different people fit different learning mechanisms. Then the problem is about awareness of where you fit and skill at coordination with others who fit elsewhere.

Very good tips.. I always mess up when doing spaced repetition since I don't take notes, I try to re-read the whole previous material in the book again and I get demotivated that I have to read all that so that I remember all the previous material. Do you know a way to get out of this habit?

Start taking notes.

interweave*

No, it is interleave in this case https://www.retrievalpractice.org/interleaving

Do you wish you had time to learn about them? Or do you wish you just knew them? Having them uploaded to your brain might make you know about them, but is much different from having time to learn them. This is important if for you, like for me, learning itself is a large part of the enjoyment

A lot of these are just links to coursera. And quite a few are not from universities (saw a few by PWC)

too many ads on this page, and the links go to more pages with ads and mostly to a website that only has "samples" of the courses for free

a repository of free online courses would be great, but despite the good intentions, this site is not it

Unfortunately, the promise of free online university courses is a thing of a the past. EDX and Coursera got bought out and are now money-making online ed sites.

If anyone responsible for the site's CSS happens to see this, the fixed height in pixels of #header causes the nav bar links to be partially obscured making them more difficult to click. My current window's width is 1600.

Too bad that most Coursera courses are now behind a paywall. First they were free without certification, after a few years they removed the access to quizzes and tests but you could still audit for free. Now, you have to pay.

Have the LLMs digested these courses already? If so, How would we evaluate that claim ?

I can't even find the CS50 on it...I doubt the whole quality of this list.

Search for "computer science". I found several CS50...

i remember finding this site awhile ago. they also have a list of cool podcasts to listen to

All this great free learning! We live in a time of incredible abundance.

And yet when I look up from my phone at the screens of everyone else on the bus, I am the only one not on Instagram.

How are these selected for inclusion? I don't understand the point of this list.

People don't go to universities for courses

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