Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Free Online Courses, Books, and Textbooks

I'm a big fan of education, and I think low-cost (or free) education can be great if it's reliable. One of the problems with doing research online is you can spend nearly as much time guessing the validity of the information you're reading as you do actually doing research. We tend to trust courses from recognized institutions a little more than just random web sites, so I've collected some resources I personally believe useful to someone trying to educate themselves online.


First, I'd like to start with Project Gutenberg.


While Project Gutenberg isn't an educational site in itself, it's a collection of free books you can download legally. Have you seen books at the bookstore, perhaps some classics, that are just a few dollars? You might be able to find many of them through this project.


Next on my list is iTunes U, YouTube EDU, and OpenCourseWare.


iTunes U is a collection of free courses from major, recognized educational institutions. This is one of the largest collections I know of, and you could easily spend most of your free time educating yourself if that's one of your hobbies. YouTube EDU has plenty of education videos but I find the organization of iTunes must better and easier to access.


OpenCourseWare is a little different. You can usually get course materials along with the lectures and videos. One of the most popular OpenCourseWare sites is MIT OpenCourseWare, with 1900 courses at the time of this blog post.


The OpenCourseWare Consortium web site lists other institutions offering OpenCourseWare courses.


Three particular sites I found interesting in my searching into this topic were:


Purdue Online Writing Lab - Not just for students of Purdue, this sites has a collection of resources from middle school through adulthood. One of the areas particularly useful to me is the APA and MLA style guides for writing papers (a lot more fun than a printed handbook).

Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner - A collection of videos and podcasts for those interested in starting a business or enhancin their current business.

There's a great video on open-source learning I'd highly recommend you watch about Connexions, a site being developed for open-source, quality educational course content.

For those of you interested in the Wiki movements, you might find the Wikiversity and WikiEducator sites useful.

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Some resources for free or low-cost textbooks:

Videos That make you Think:

More interesting course links:

Further Reading:

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4 comments:

  1. Joanne BainesDecember 22, 2009 at 11:40 AM

    I love it Dave! I know that you put a lot of time and effort into this. I appreciate that very much. I also applaud your passion for education.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousDecember 28, 2009 at 8:30 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 14, 2010 at 11:07 AM

    I've had to learn web design in a hurry. I found you're tutorials and they were a great help. Now I'm looking at your links.

    I thought I'd let you know.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownOctober 4, 2010 at 10:20 AM

    nice site you have

    ReplyDelete

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