Online Lectures

I never get tired of web surfing. Some sites are time wasters, some give you new ideas, and some teach. I’d like to share some of the sites that provide lectures and instruction for different topics.

Many universities across the country have free online courses or lectures. These are usually licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, which allows you to share and adapt the content if you attribute it the way the author has specified. The topics are varied. Do you want to learn French? You might want to sign up for an open course through the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. Need a little extra money? Why not design an application for the iPhone? The course from Stanford includes the video lectures, PowerPoint slides, and PDFs. It, as well as many other courses can be found on iTunes. (C-language and programming experience are prerequisites for the iPhone Apps class, but there isn’t a shortage of other, less technology-related courses!) Other universities providing entire courses or lectures include Yale, MIT (1900 courses from which to choose), UC Berkeley, and many more. Most of the videos for these courses or lectures can be downloaded from YouTube.

Another interesting source for lectures is TED, which is a nonprofit organization which focuses on Ideas Worth Spreading. Their annual conference is a bit pricey ($6,000), but you can watch many of the lectures that are inspiring, funny, informative, and worth watching. You can also subscribe to TED Talks. For those of you unfamiliar with subscribing, keep watching this blog for more information!
If you want your students to review their calculus, be inspired by a lecture, or just see what it’s like to go to MIT, you might want to guide them to one of these online lectures or courses. For those of us who never tire of learning, these courses and lectures are just what we need.