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Open Courseware | Online Courses from Colleges

Open Courseware

In 1994 Wayne Hodgins coined the term learning object, which means a piece of educational material that can be reused in different settings. Since then many academic institutions have set up their own projects to make learning available to all, with MIT’s OpenCourseWare at the vanguard. Here are some of the best free courses available on the web from a variety of schools around the world.

  • Open Courseware from Universities

    • University of Michigan Open Courseware has courses and resources from the School of Education.
    • Fullbright Economics Courseware groups financial courses by academic year so it is easy to start with the basics and move to more advanced material.
    • Samples of Harvard’s Distance Education Courses are ready for exploration. Full classes are only available upon registration.
    • Oxford University Mathematics OpenCourseWare covers basic to advanced math and includes specialized subjects like logic theory and lie algebras.
    • Free Public Lectures are available from the United Kingdom’s Gersham College. They broach a wide range of topics including business, medicine and music. Those in the unusual section are especially diverse and interesting.
    • The Open Courseware at John Hopkins University includes many different materials. Lecture notes, syllabi, images and other multimedia are deliver through the classes.
    • MIT’s Open Courseware is one of the most popular sources of higher education online.
    • The Learning Space at Open University provides users with a broad array of topics in over 600 free online courses.
    • Webcast.Berkeley is a free service that brings recorded lectures from the classroom straight to your computer.
    • BYU’s Open Course Material may not have the bells and whistles of others’ but presents lots of information on education and related subjects.
    • Tufts Open Courseware focuses on the life sciences with offerings in medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine. The list is rounded out with courses from their school of arts & sciences and the Fletcher School of International Relations.
    • OpenCourseWare at Capilano University focuses on bring humanities information to the public, although chemsitry, business, computing science and mathematics are also included.
    • United Nations University OpenCourseWare focuses on finding solutions to contemporary problems. Their courses focus on economic, environmental and software development.
    • UC Irvine’s OpenCourseWare includes popular topics and full courses in various subjects. Courses include notes, videos of lectures and assignments.
    • Michigan State University’s Open Educational Resources projects offer information on Latin America, food safety and agriculture.
    • Stanford Engineering Everywhere offers video lectures, notes, assignments and tests for some of their most popular course.
    • OpenCourseWare at Notre Dame covers everything from writing to aerospace engineering.
    • Utah State offers notes, presentations, assignments and multimedia for many of their courses.
    • Columbia Interactive, while now defunct, has interviews, lectures and seminars on many topics.
    • The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University lives up to its name by providing lecture series on property and sharing.
    • The University of Massachusetts in Boston develops open courses in many of its departments for a diverse learning experience.
    • Delft University of Technology provides course in science and most are available in English.
    • Free music lessons are available from Berklee Shares, a project from the Berklee College of Music.
    • The University of the Western Cape offers the Free Courseware Project with information in biology, information science, law and medicine.
    • U-M Open Educational Resources are designed by the University of Michigan and include medical, scientific and artistic lessons.
    • The Open Learning Initiative was created by Carnegie Mellon University and offers courses in scientific disciplines, business concepts and, surprisingly, French.
    • UCT OpenContent, put together my the University of Capetown, includes courses on topics from web optimization to zoology.
    • The University of South Queensland has a few courses available online for prospective students to sample.
    • U-NOW is the University of Nottingham’s open courseware and includes lessons, podcasts, notes  and videos on many topics.

  • Open Courseware from Other Institutions

    • BBC Academy has free courses on the science of broadcast media, from production to journalism to the technology involved.
    • NASA Online hosts tons of pictures, videos, shows and podcasts on their activities and the science surrounding space travel.
    • iTunesU is Apple’s version of the university, providing downloadable, high quality videos, audio and written content for browsing, and much of the material is free!
    • The Smithsonian Institute allows you to browse their exhibits online and has additional information in their researchers and educators sections.
    • Connexions is a clearinghouse of educational information on many different topics.
    • As part of Wikimedia, Wikiversity is a user contributed community fostering education in all subjects.
    • Digital History collects information and multimedia related to American History.
    • The San Francisco Exploratorium shares their passion for science and art in their online galleries and digital library.
    • MusicTheoryNet is an archive of information, practice problems and software to improve your understanding of music.
    • While not courseware technically, Google Scholar is one of the best ways to find academic material in any subject on the web.
    • Nature, an international scientific journal, has podcasts and videos in addition to their papers for a comprehensive education on the world around us.
    • The Education Section of the Internet Archive brings together lessons from around the web that include submissions from users and some of the most respected resources available.
    • Sofia aims to share intellectual assets and does so through its eight courses in arts, programming and basic math.
    • National Geographic has some video features from their magazines and television products and also offers a kids section with educational material for children.
    • W3 Schools was founded by the W3 Consortium to promote web development with educational materials on HTML, XML, Javascript and many other languages.
    • The World Lecture Hall includes course materials from universities around the world including audio, video and notes.