Sensible Erection | Free Online Courses from Top Universities

Sunday, 2 September 2012

Free Online Courses from Top Universities

quote [ Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins are among the 16 universities that have partnered with a newly launched company called Coursera to offer more than 100 free online courses this academic year; MIT, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, are following suit through a nonprofit venture called edX. ]

Finally, free higher level education! More classes below. Quote from mental_floss

www.edx.org

[sci&tech] [by Lacuna@1:43pmGMT] [+10]

Comments

Naruki said @ 2:09pm GMT on 2nd Sep
Very hmm-worthy...

iosef said @ 2:55pm GMT on 2nd Sep
meh. i don't want to sit at my computer and watch a video. i want to sit in a lecture where i can ask the professor questions and interact with students. Learning is not just absorbing information. True learning entails understanding, and understanding requires interaction.

Fortunately many professors will happily allow you to sit in their class if you express interest, no enrollment/tuition required.

drzapato said @ 3:37pm GMT on 2nd Sep
I'm taking a course about Sustainability right now through coursera. there's some crazy number of students in the class, like 26,000 or something, so the forums for discussing the text and lectures are actually really active.

I agree that I would prefer to be in a classroom, absolutely, but for me right now, living in Ukraine, that's not really an option. This is a good way to take some interesting classes and learn some new things. It probably wouldn't hurt to put on a application if I end up applying for grad school. Also for people that can't afford the ridiculous price of school, this is a good option.

mrcucumber said @ 3:45pm GMT on 2nd Sep
So you live in Ukraine, take a course in sustainability, and your handle is Dr. Shoe in spanish?

drzapato said @ 2:03pm GMT on 7th Sep
and I demand to be taken seriously!!

blacksun said @ 6:03pm GMT on 2nd Sep [Score:2 Underrated]
Courses formerly only available to those who attend these colleges, moving, paying for dorms / housing, living expenses not to mention tuition costing thousands of dollars, are now available for you right in front of your face, in your house, for free, and it gets a "meh". Unbelievable. However, I do agree with your point to some degree that learning benefits from interaction and certainly question and answer sessions. Unfortunately, in many universities, sure, you can talk to the professor after class, but for the most part, the classes are held in huge lecture halls, with no interaction, amongst hundreds of other students. So, it's not that different from an online interface after all. I just think the learning "business" has gotten bloated, ineffective and greedy, and I'd like to see that deconstructed and reformed, as well as valuable knowledge put in the hands of all people, everywhere, regardless of income or location. That's truly powerful and revolutionary. Not "meh"! ;p

mrcucumber said @ 6:18pm GMT on 2nd Sep
I just think ........ "business" has gotten bloated, ineffective and greedy, and I'd like to see that deconstructed and reformed

Yeah. You could say that about a lot these days.

iosef said @ 8:31pm GMT on 2nd Sep
I agree that knowledge is valuable, but knowledge by itself can only get you so far (unless your name happens to be Ken Jennings).

The depth of human knowledge is many disciplines is really quite extraordinary. If you want to truly become proficient and well-rounded in one of them, trying to essentially teach yourself is a difficult and lonely road indeed.

I'm glad that more online courses are being made available, but I see them as just one more useful source of information along with books, journals, wikipedia, etc rather than a revolutionary new way to be educated.

Spaceloaf said @ 8:44pm GMT on 2nd Sep
My university experience pretty much required close interaction with professors and students.

Yes, the intro classes are these giant masses where there's tons of students and the material doesn't warrant/require any sort of interaction (and even then, some of my intro engineering classes were hard enough that working with other students still helped a lot).

But once you start getting into the upper level courses, the class sizes are pretty small and the difficult material makes collaboration vital. I've had courses where the professor's office hours became a supplementary lecture since pretty much the entire class would show up asking questions.

I think it's great to spread knowledge around and there's no reason not to offer people the opportunity to learn. But I would be highly skeptical of anyone claiming to have a certified degree that completed their entire education watching videos.

tl;dr version: Yes to online materials but no to offering degrees through online materials (unless they improve the technology to the point that you actually interact with peers/professors via webcam/chat).

captainstubing said @ 11:28am GMT on 3rd Sep
I still do a bit of part time teaching at my old Uni. We are currently looking into ways to use some of the new tech to modify the way we deliver and also how the kids interact with us and each other when they decide they want to learn something. I'm not convinced the old, essentially medieval model of one wise person in front of a hundred scriveners really needs to survive, but interaction is really important. I think that is what we need to look towards - most groups of students are fully capable of teaching each other most introductory courses and some intermediate stuff. Higher level stuff the really bright kids can still be pretty much left to it, with the others being where you can add some value with your teaching.

Anyhow, here is one fairly well known attempt to use some of the new delivery ideas:

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_norvig_the_100_000_student_classroom.html

Worth a look.

sherlock said @ 2:39am GMT on 3rd Sep
You do realize that "lecture", which means "reading", as in a one way stream of knowledge, and "interaction" are literally oxymorons, right? And in practice they pretty much are except for the professor and the one dude in the front row that everybody hates.

sherlock said @ 2:42am GMT on 3rd Sep
well, maybe not literally oxymorons as I've misused the term there. But the phrase "interaction in lecture" could be an oxymoron.

EPT said @ 7:40am GMT on 3rd Sep
My lecturers used to pack up really fast and try to escape the room before that one guy could get to them and nail them with a barrage of daft questions...

iosef said @ 10:24am GMT on 3rd Sep
I'm not talking about massive lecture halls for introductory courses. That shit you can pick up from a book.

cyrano said @ 2:08am GMT on 4th Sep
Yeah, wouldn't we all. I'm doing an on-line cryptography course out of Stanford and a database/big-data course out of IIT. I'm 3000 miles from the closest campus. I'll take the education I can get over the venue I dream of all day long.

Paradise Lost said @ 6:52pm GMT on 2nd Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
I've always been a big proponent of things like this if for anything it's a great way to get facts about something. If you understand the scientific process and would just like to learn about the solar system, I can't see anything with wrong with a free undergrad class with notes, homework assignments and the like. I can always check up on my answers on this thing called the Internet. I really doubt anyone is currently trying to use them as a viable alternative to the University (although maybe it's just because currently this is such a new thing), but just as way to learn more.

Also I think everyone who argues against free classes because there exists this awesome utopia of inquisitive minds in "real" classrooms seems to have completely forgotten their own shitty college experience. Even the famed old MIT 6.001 for computer science undergrads was videotaped in the mid-80s for students who couldn't take the class. Quite a few programmers have learned a good deal from the lectures, book, and recently, OpenCourseWare version of the class. Sad enough to see a class they never really took switch it's methods and programming language. Who's to say that more online classes can't duplicate its success.

dj-glass said @ 7:37pm GMT on 2nd Sep
I went to University for 5 years to get a Bachelor's degree. A little later I went to a community college for over 3, to pick up new skills (mostly silkscreen printing, which I have now set up to do at home). I love school, and miss it still. This seems like a fun thing to try. While at Community College I took several online classes. It is not a perfect setup, I did miss interaction with the professor and other classmates for sure. But I can't say I didn't learn anything from them. I think I'm going to sign up for Coursera's "Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society" class. It seems really interesting and perhaps even helpful. So thank you for this.

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:53pm GMT on 2nd Sep
I don't know where you guys went to school, but for at least the first two years, there really wasn't a lot of room in class to ask questions. I mean, sure, you could wait until after class, ask a TA, or another student... but it's not like the course permitted the professor to spend half his lecture answering questions... they had a set amount of course work and material to get through and I really don't see why a BBS styled forum wouldn't work just as well to answer questions if not better. At least this way you can google the answer online.

snowfox said @ 8:10pm GMT on 2nd Sep [Score:2 WTF]
Thread jack!

zarathustra said @ 11:57pm GMT on 2nd Sep
Between watching classes on line and auditing classes at uni ( two this semester), I have attended/watched more classes than I did in the course of my BA and JD.

Just going to list some observations.

I've never paid to audit a class. In 101's they won't even notice you are there. In higher level classes, they can use the extra body and most professors don't' give a shit about the bureaucracy.

If I am in a class where I am as ignorant as the students, I ask questions as they do. If I am in a class where, because of earlier education or professional training I know stuff beyond the level the class is geared towards, I talk to the professor after.

zarathustra said @ 11:58pm GMT on 2nd Sep
I was going to add some more there but hit post by mistake. So now I won't. I could feel a run on coming.

mrcucumber said @ 2:08am GMT on 3rd Sep
He, if you're gonna get the runs, do it somewhere else, ok?

epease said @ 1:57am GMT on 3rd Sep
Free education is always a good thing. Now if I could have the museums free more than one day a month...

azazel said @ 6:21am GMT on 3rd Sep
At least you get them free once a month. We get three days before Christmas, and only at one location.

captainstubing said @ 11:46am GMT on 3rd Sep
Luxury!

spite48 said @ 11:28pm GMT on 4th Sep
Why in my day we had to pay not to go to the museum two days out of three, and even then we had to go every third day, memorize the exhibits, reconstruct them exactly out of yarn, and then eat the result.