1,700 free online courses from top universities

(openculture.com)

106 points | by momentmaker 3 hours ago ago

24 comments

  • aanet 4 minutes ago

    Have the LLMs digested these courses already? If so, How would we evaluate that claim ?

  • CalChris 2 hours ago

    The Stanford iTunesU classes have been truncated to a few seconds. So Susanna Braund's Aeneid course (which was brilliant) is gone. Same thing with their Hannibal course. I don't know that they're available elsewhere. Apple dropped iTunesU (2021?) and Stanford didn't have a backup.

  • mparnisari 2 hours ago

    https://www.openculture.com/free_textbooks - none of the free textbooks that i tried worked? i picked a few from the CompSci category

    • mym1990 2 hours ago

      When you say they didn't work, what does that mean? Opened 10-20 and they all opened as a PDF or a webpage(albeit some don't have HTTPS certificates).

  • wodenokoto 2 hours ago

    A lot of these are just links to coursera. And quite a few are not from universities (saw a few by PWC)

  • helterskelter 2 hours ago

    https://openstax.org/higher-education

    ^^ Good resource for textbooks

  • shostack 2 hours ago

    There are so many things I wish I had time to learn about. I don't need my learning resources, I need a way to jack in and have them uploaded to my brain.

    • pastel8739 an hour ago

      Do you wish you had time to learn about them? Or do you wish you just knew them? Having them uploaded to your brain might make you know about them, but is much different from having time to learn them. This is important if for you, like for me, learning itself is a large part of the enjoyment

    • helterskelter 2 hours ago

      The book Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel is helpful. tl;dr of it is:

      - lots of low-stakes quizzing and practice

      - spaced repetition

      - reflect on what you've learned and what you could do better next time, and apply these lessons in different contexts

      - interleave practice of different but related topics

      - try to solve a problem before being taught the solution

      - distill the underlying principles to different problems

      - remember that if learning is easy, you probably aren't engaging you brain very much

      This will help streamline the process, but obviously there's just a limit to what you can take in.

      • CaptWorld an hour ago

        Very good tips.. I always mess up when doing spaced repetition since I don't take notes, I try to re-read the whole previous material in the book again and I get demotivated that I have to read all that so that I remember all the previous material. Do you know a way to get out of this habit?

        • naishoya 18 minutes ago

          Start taking notes.

      • dartharva an hour ago

        All these things presume actual interest and savviness about the topic present in the student beforehand, which is precisely what most students that struggle with studies lack.

        • helterskelter 13 minutes ago

          Actually, some of the research they base their advice on was performed on elementary school students, and college classrooms which had poor attendance; ie, not the most engaged students. Simple things like giving elementary students an ungraded quiz right before class (to force recall) two or three times a week raised grades substantially, and a college class that switched from midterms/finals to 9 quizzes plus a final not only had higher attendance, but also had much higher grades on their finals with basically none of the students falling behind. Another experiment had young kids practice throwing beans bags into a bucket, one group alternating practice between 2 and 4 feet, and another only practicing at 3 feet. After a month or two, they were tested on throwing the bag into the bucket at 3 feet and the kids who practiced at 2 and 4 feet performed significantly better than the kids who only practiced at 3. Anyway, my point is that small, simple changes to how you study can have big implications for retention, without too much extra effort.

          Sorry, I'm still reading this book right now and it's super interesting.

  • S04dKHzrKT an hour ago

    If anyone responsible for the site's CSS happens to see this, the fixed height in pixels of #header causes the nav bar links to be partially obscured making them more difficult to click. My current window's width is 1600.

  • cadamsdotcom 15 minutes ago

    All this great free learning! We live in a time of incredible abundance.

    And yet when I look up from my phone at the screens of everyone else on the bus, I am the only one not on Instagram.

  • terrycody an hour ago

    I can't even find the CS50 on it...I doubt the whole quality of this list.

    • gabrielsroka an hour ago

      Search for "computer science". I found several CS50...

  • AlexeyBrin 39 minutes ago

    Too bad that most Coursera courses are now behind a paywall. First they were free without certification, after a few years they removed the access to quizzes and tests but you could still audit for free. Now, you have to pay.

  • mmooss an hour ago

    How are these selected for inclusion? I don't understand the point of this list.

  • ai_slop_hater 2 hours ago

    People don't go to universities for courses