Entries Tagged as 'Education'

Universities With the Best Free Online Courses

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu)

If you are looking for a wide range of free courses offered online, MIT is your best option. More than 1,800 free courses are offered through the school’s OpenCourseWare project. Courses are in text, audio and video formats and translated into a number of different languages. Students all over the world use OpenCourseWare and 96 percent of visitors to this site say they would recommend it to someone else.

2. Open University (open.ac.uk)

The Open University is the UK’s largest academic institution. The school’s OpenLearn website gives everyone free access to both undergraduate and graduate-level course materials from The Open University. Courses cover a wide range of topics, such as the arts, history, business, education, IT and computing, mathematics and statistics, science, health and technology.

3. Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu)

Carnegie Mellon University offers a number of free online courses and materials through a program called Open Learning Initiative. OLI courses are intended to allow anyone at an introductory college level to learn about a particular subject without formal instruction. Course options include such offerings as statistics, biology, chemistry, economics, French and physics.

4. Tufts University (tufts.edu)

Like MIT, Tufts has OpenCourseWare that is available free to everyone. Courses are sorted by school (i.e. School of Arts and Sciences, School of Medicine, etc.) and include assignments, lecture notes and other supplementary materials.

5. Stanford (stanford.edu)

Stanford University, one of the world’s leading academic institutions, has joined forces with iTunes U in providing access to Stanford courses, lectures and interviews. These courses can be downloaded and played on iPods, PCs, and Macs and can also be burned to CDs. If you don’t have iTunes, you can download it here for free.

6. University of California, Berkeley (berkeley.edu)

UC Berkley, one of the best public universities in the nation, has been offering live and on-demand webcasts of certain courses since 2001. Hundreds of UC Berkley courses, both current and archived, are now available as podcasts and webcasts. Courses cover a range of subjects, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer programming, engineering, psychology, legal studies and philosophy.

7. Utah State University (usu.edu)

Utah State University also provides access to free online courses. Study options include everything from anthropology to physics and theatre arts. These comprehensive text-based courses can be downloaded as zip files or viewed directly on the site.

8. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (kutztownsbdc.org)

Kutztown University’s Small Business Development Center offers the largest collection of free business courses available on the web. Course topics include accounting, finance, government, business law, marketing and sales. Comprehensive text, interactive case studies, slides, graphics and streaming audio help to demonstrate the concepts presented in each course.

9. University of Southern Queensland (usq.edu.au)

The University of Southern Queensland in Australia provides free online access to a number of different courses through yet another OpenCourseWare initiative. Courses from each of the five faculties are available, covering a broad range of topics, including communication, science, career planning, technology, teaching and multimedia creation.

10. University of California, Irvine (uci.edu)

UC Irvine, one of the nation’s top public universities, recently joined the OCW Consortium and began providing free university level courses online. Right now, there are only a handful of options to choose from, but this list is growing. Current courses cover topics like financial planning, human resources, capital markets and e-marketing. Course materials include syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams.

From educational-portal.com

Tags: Education by Fred
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Stanford Engineering Everywhere – Free Courses

What is Stanford Engineering Everywhere?

Stanford Engineering Everywhere is an online portal offering ten courses from Stanford’s School of Engineering— including the three-course introductory sequence in Computer Science— free of charge.

SEE offers course content available to Stanford students including instructional videos, reading lists and materials and class assignments. And SEE allows you to communicate with fellow SEE students online.

SEE encourages fellow educators to use Stanford course materials in their own classrooms.

Note: SEE courses cannot be taken for credit and do not include access to Stanford-restricted computers, libraries, or services. Content may not include all the material used in the campus offering and cannot be used for commercial purposes.

View FAQ’s – About See

How Do I Use Stanford Engineering Everywhere?

SEE users may pick and choose the materials that best meet their needs and interests. Want a refresher course on a particular programming concept? View a video lecture that covers the basics. Are you a programming novice? Spend several weeks viewing lectures, reading course materials and tackling class assignments. Test your knowledge by taking quizzes and exams.

For Students:
You can have all or some of Stanford’s world-class educational experience at your convenience. And best of all, it’s free. SEE courses include the same video lectures, assignments, exams and solution sets (where appropriate) used by Stanford students.

You can also select only those materials that meet your educational needs. You may download only course notes or the complete set of lecture videos. SEE offers courses in three of its most popular disciplines: Artificial Intelligence, Introduction to Computer Science, and Linear Systems and Optimization.

For Educators:
Educators around the world can use material from popular Stanford courses in their own classrooms. Whether it is a handout or a full set of course materials, SEE materials are available to educators free of charge under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode). SEE allows educators worldwide to use and tailor course materials to meet the needs of their own students.

Introduction to Computer Science

Programming Methodology

Programming Abstractions

Programming Paradigms

More Courses

Tags: Education, computer science by Fred
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VEMUS – Virtual European Music School

VEMUS (Virtual European Music School) aims at developing and thoroughly validating an open, highly interactive and networked multilingual music tuition framework for popular instruments such as the flute, the saxophone, the clarinet and the recorder. The system will address students of beginning to intermediate level. The VEMUS environment will integrate innovative, pedagogically-motivated e-learning components to augment traditional music teaching in different learning settings:

  • Self-practicing: A set of tools will be designed to enhance self-practising, at home or in the lab, by making practising sessions much more informative, constructive and enjoyable. Automatic performance evaluation and structured high-level feedback tailored to each student is expected to maximise the effectiveness of practicing at home.
  • Music classroom: VEMUS will explore and validate innovative tools to support music teaching in group settings, be it teaching aids to support the teacher, or tools to support collaborative learning and group activities. These will provide the basis for introducing VEMUS to the classroom enhancing the music tuition procedures and the student learning experience.
  • Distance learning extensions: The VEMUS environment will provide distance learning extensions; maintaining and managing an open content repository, offering authoring tools to augment it, providing communication tools and allowing remote coaching of students and monitoring of their progress through time. These features will help to further build on the student-teacher relationship also allowing the participation of students which might else be impossible due to geographic or other constraints.

Addressing these three distinct but complementary learning environments through an environment and interoperable tools, will permit VEMUS to smoothly blend e-learning with traditional face-to-face lessons. These will provide the technological and pedagogical basis for a virtual meeting and practicing place for students and teachers from around Europe: a Virtual European Music School. The introduction of novel technological tools for music tuition will allow for the exploration of new teaching practices in music that will enrich the traditional procedures.

VEMUS will build on the results and the existing platform and tools developed and preliminarily validated in the context of the successful IMUTUS project that concluded recently. IMUTUS (IST-2001-32270) delivered an efficient self-practicing environment with automatic high-level performance assessment features and a distance learning infrastructure for sharing learning content and for communication. The assessment and validation activities of IMUTUS have provided clear evidence for the strong potential of the introduced approach for instrument practice.

VEMUS will bring that approach further, extending to new learning environments and covering the needs of additional learning settings and a wider audience. VEMUS will elaborate on the distance learning environment and enhance the learning objects with additional meaningful and well-motivated metadata that will allow the characterization content on the basis of basic musical and instrument control skills. Highly innovative classroom features such as collaborative authoring and sharing of resources and learning objects in the classroom will also be explored to ensure a consistent link between working in the classroom and working at home on material collected in the classroom.

The VEMUS Consortium includes 6 countries, 3 of which are new or candidate member states. VEMUS gathered in its ranks all the necessary expertise from the critical areas involved and clearly adopts a European dimension with the participation of partners from 6 countries, 3 of which are new or candidate member states. Using music as the main vehicle and engaging groups in different countries and diverse contexts, VEMUS seeks to reach people from different backgrounds and cultures, creating cultural links and ensuring a larger sharing of knowledge and research results and a larger impact.

VEMUS adopts a strongly user-centred approach, with user groups actively participating throughout the lifetime of the project: from requirements, to field-tests, evaluation activities, and over. This network will help achieve a wider spread of the project results and raise awareness on music e-learning. The high participation of user groups in the consortium assures a strongly user-centered implementation process and brings to the project the opportunity to develop its approach at an even larger scale and to address critical factors that will provide the basis for wider subsequent deployment initiatives.

With planned market-related activities and the participation of SME’s, one of which is a major music house in Greece with significant and prolonged experience in the field, VEMUS will also be able to incorporate a market-oriented dimension, investigating, planning and pursuing opportunities for the exploitation of the project results.

Currently, there is no commercial or other system that incorporates the features planned for VEMUS. Existing systems cover isolated parts and, most of times, do so very poorly. If IMUTUS has been an innovation in self-practicing, VEMUS can revolutionize music tuition by presenting a complete approach covering individuals, groups and music classes, as well as organizations such as music schools and conservatories, and seamlessly blending e-learning and innovative technological enhancements with traditional face-to-face lessons in a complete learning setting.

Tags: Education, Music by Fred
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arXig.org e-print archive from Cornell University

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

Physics

Mathematics

Nonlinear Sciences

Computer Science

Quantitative Biology

Statistics

About arXiv

Tags: Education, computer science, research, science by Fred
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Sophia project

The Sofia project is an open content initiative launched by the Foothill – De Anza Community College District with funding support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Under the leadership of Foothill College, Sofia promotes faculty and institutional sharing of online content.

Modeled after MIT′s OpenCourseWare Initiative, Sofia encourages the  free exchange of community college-level materials on the World Wide Web. It is our hope that Sofia will lead to the exploration of ways of supporting instruction and student learning using web-based resources.

Directed by Vivian Sinou, Dean of Learning Technology & Innovations at Foothill College, Sofia was launched with a pilot in March of 2004. The pilot effort began with a call for contributions that was extended to faculty from Foothill-De Anza, the ETUDES Alliance, and the California Virtual Campus. The long-term vision is to broaden participation in the Sofia project, promoting openness, sharing, and collaboration globally.

Course Gallery

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Connexions – Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities

Connexions
a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

  • authors create and collaborate
  • instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
  • learners find and explore content

Link to content

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The Open University: Distance Learning

The Open University provides high-quality university education to all.

The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

Link to Courses

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Tufts Open Courseware from Tufts University

Tufts University has joined MIT in offering the world free access to certain course content online. Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) seeks to capitalize on the potential of the internet to eliminate borders and geographic distance as obstacles to the instantaneous exchange of knowledge and new ideas. Unlike distance learning programs that charge tuition, provide formal instruction and limit participation, OpenCourseWare offers all course materials free to everyone with online access. Educators from around the world may upgrade their classes; students may enhance their coursework or pursue self study; the general public may glimpse the depth and breadth of what leading universities are offering and benefit from reading lists and lectures.

OCW does not require any registration and is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity. It is instead an effort to share knowledge and make the best educational use of the Internet’s potential. The project has already been embraced by students and educators around the globe, many of whom are from areas where educational resources are scarce or difficult to access.

Much of the course material from the health sciences schools is housed in the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) and was transformed into OCW format by TUSK staff. This website represents only a sampling of Tufts course materials online. The initial course offerings represent the contributions Tufts and its faculty can make to the project’s global reach by focusing on both life sciences and courses with an international component.

While Tufts OCW faculty pride themselves on providing the most comprehensive course content possible, in some cases the full complement of OCW course materials may not appear online due to copyright and other intellectual property issues. This is particularly true of health sciences courses where professors often draw on a wealth of sources, making it difficult to gain all the approvals and releases needed to include everything in a publicly available site. However, users should find bibliographies and syllabi a fertile resource for information.

For more information go to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the HELP page or contact us.

Visit worldwide OCW sites from around the world.

Link to Courses

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