Incredible.
Thank you, I needed a new historically-based podcast! Off to sub to Online College Courses & Accredited Degree Programs - Academic Earth .
Wow, that’s great. I can’t wait until this becomes even more popular and there are more videos and classes. Just imagine how powerful it is that everyone can get a world class education for free. Obviously you don’t get the degree, but that’s really irrelevant unless you plan to be employed in that field.
You know, you keep hearing that, but has anyone actually taken all that free information and made a name for themselves (Cecil notwithstanding)? The Wikipedia, I’d argue, contains more knowledge than your average college education (at least in breadth if not depth), MIT has been offering its course materials for free for years, etc. Where are the self-taught superscientists?
I was actually wondering that the other night. What if someone just has an affinity for medical knowledge and they take the MCATs without ever taking a medical class ever just because they liked to read all the books and absorb the knowledge?
I never hard about the MIT thing so I went and looked. Unless I’m doing it wrong it looks like many of the courses just include selections of material.
That is way cool.
Oh…my…Og…
This is awesome.
I was talking about MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which is probably what you found. No, it doesn’t have everything, but it lets you follow a rough lesson plan. A lot of the stuff is in textbooks, anyway. As a university student, honestly, some of the classes I’ve taken might as well have been textbooks + automatic online quizzes.
IMO, the only worthwhile part of university is the access to faculty and the classroom discussions/interactions, some of which can be (and is) duplicated online already. Heck, I dare say I’ve learned, inquired, and grown more because of the Dope than because of higher education.
I love you.
This is the greatest internet find I’ve heard of in a while! Thanks.
Excellent find!
Thank you very much for sharing!
Whoa…
Thankitty-thank-thank!!!
Well. I hate to denigrate the Dope, because I HAVE learned an awful lot here, but you can’t actually compare it to a higher education. I’m a student right now and I learn just a tad more from my professors than I do from alla y’all.
This is great. My favorite lectures from college were the Classic Civ courses I took as free electives. University of Illinois had a really famous guy who’d been teaching the introductory courses to Roman and Greek mythology for years and years and he was easily the most entertaining professor I ever watched. Naturally, my first instinct was to see if his courses were available here and of course it’s limited to a handful of Universities only. My next move was to check out the similar class at Yale available there and…wow, that guy is painfully dry. He’s the stereotype of every terrible lecturer ever imagined.
It’s killing me that I can’t recall the name of my old professor. According to the UIUC website it looks like he’s moved on (maybe died) in the past 10 years.
This is excellent!
I checked MIT out, and it is very hard to navigate. There is not anything coherent, in a systematic sense, for the wannabe learner. I think that it was a collage of half-finished web-pages of Academic Assistants.
Not getting hired because they don’t have degrees.
Stanford and Harvard have all their course materials on iTunesU (Requires iTunes). You actually can see any Harvard course online through it.
On Jeopardy! Think Ken Jennings.