chamcham wrote:

You're forgetting the 2 most important pioneers in free online
education: MIT Open Courseware and Khan Academy.

Agreed! I've learned a lot from MIT Courseware lectures especially when I needed to brush up on chemistry.

There are Open Coursewares from other universities but MIT has way more subjects. I like to look at CAL and UCLA Open Coursewares too.

chamcham wrote:

You're forgetting the 2 most important pioneers in free online
education: MIT Open Courseware and Khan Academy.

OpenCourseWare is actually the first one I came across, but it seemed to be just PDF-based. I thought the video lecture/assignment structure of Coursera would be interesting. It's possible to interact with other people on the course too, and it seems that the assignments/exams get graded somehow, which I don't quite get because tens of thousands of people sign up to a single course...

shinsen wrote:

You may be interested in what this person is doing - http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/

That does look interesting. Maybe I'll return to the MIT site after finishing 10 Days to Faster Reading

chamcham wrote:

You're forgetting the 2 most important pioneers in free online
education: MIT Open Courseware and Khan Academy.

Stanford to has an open courseware. There was 10 courses on YouTube at first (with their materials) then they made three courses that you can enroll in and must hand homework and exams at certain times, and receive a certificate after finishing. I registered in Machine Learning, it wasn't bad, but the explanations were over simplified that made me too annoyed and left at about lecture 9, not to mention that I found the topic boring. I've watched some of the Introduction to Robotics course given by Ousama Khatib to supplement the one I was taking at uni at the time, but I found his explanations to be non-rigorous at all, so it wasn't helping.
What I found to be fantastic are the Programming Methodology and Intro to Linear Dynamical Systems (given by Stephen Boyd, one of the most eminent lecturers) courses, both lecturers are excellent, and break the boring class atmosphere. Boyd brings up the most interesting related topics even if it's not necessary to understand them, he provokes deep thinking and understanding of the material, for the interested student.

There's also that Indian institute that has a lot of courses of which many are interesting for me, but I couldn't get most of their accent!

Stanford's OCW website: http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Edit:

shinsen wrote:

You may be interested in what this person is doing - http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/

Wow, CS students take Multi-variable Calculus, Signals and Systems, Circuits, and Introduction to Communication, Control, and Signal Processing??! These are engineering courses (except calc) and not of the easy type, MIT never stops to amaze me -_-;

Last edited by undead_saif (2012 September 11, 3:52 pm)

CS students take Multi-variable Calculus, Signals and Systems, Circuits, and Introduction to Communication, Control, and Signal Processing??!

I thought this was what CS was about :S

These are great! I guess I'll add my own.
The "Lifehacker University" posts that Lifehacker does are really good for learning about interesting courses. Open Culture's list of free online courses is really good as well. Oh, and Academic Earth is a more user friendly Open Courseware search.

chamcham wrote:

dizmox wrote:

CS students take Multi-variable Calculus, Signals and Systems, Circuits, and Introduction to Communication, Control, and Signal Processing??!

I thought this was what CS was about :S

You're right. CS is more than just software engineering, but that seems to be the emphasis these days. You'd be surprised how many CS students have never opened their computer before.

That set of courses sounds more like CE, but that's what makes them MIT, I guess.  I think even English majors at MIT are required to do a pretty heavy math/science load.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2012 September 12, 2:30 am)

iTunes U has a collection of OCW from many universities (including UCLA, CAL aka UC Berkeley if you don't know it as "CAL" and MIT). You can check it out in iTunes or download the app to your iPhone/ iPad.

http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/