A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities

 

 

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A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities

via Open Culture by Dan Colman on 11/06/12

During the past two days, our list of Free Online Movies has been getting some good exposure. And we've got no complaints. But while assembling the movie list, we were also busy putting together a list of 500 Free Online Courses from top universities. Here's the lowdown: This master list lets you download free courses from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and UC Berkeley. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites. Right now you'll find 55 courses in Philosophy, 50 in History, 50 in Computer Science, 35 in Physics, and that's just beginning to scratch the surface. Most of the courses were recently produced. But, in some cases, we've layered in lecture series by famous intellectuals recorded years ago. Here are some highlights from the complete list.

• African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle – YouTube– iTunes – Clay Carson, Stanford
• Financial Markets 2011 - YouTube - iTunes - Web Site – Robert Shiller, Yale
• Growing Up in the Universe – YouTube – Richard Dawkins, Oxford
• Human Behavioral Biology – iTunes Video – YouTube – Robert Sapolsky, Stanford
• Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) – Download Course – Christine Hayes, Yale.
• Heidegger's Being & Time – iTunes - Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley
• Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Using C, PHP, and JavaScript – Multiple Formats – iTunes – David Malan, Harvard
• Introduction to Cosmology and Particle Physics – YouTube – Sean Carroll, Caltech
• Invitation to World Literature – Web Site - David Damrosch, Harvard
• iPhone Application Development in iOS5 - HD Video iTunes - Standard-Def Video iTunes - Paul Hegarty, Stanford
• Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? – YouTube - Web Site- Michael Sandel, Harvard
• Philosophy of Language – iTunes – John Searle, UC Berkeley
• Physics for Future Presidents – YouTube – Richard Muller, UC Berkeley
• Quantum Electrodynamics – Web Site - Richard Feynman, Presented at University of Auckland
• Science, Magic and Religion - iTunes - YouTube – Courtenay Raiai, UCLA
• The American Novel Since 1945 – YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video - Download Course – Amy Hungerford, Yale
• The Art of Living – Web Site – Team taught, Stanford

Visit this list of Free Courses for many more hours of free enrichment. Separately, you might also want to check out our collection of Free Language Lessons. It offers free lessons in over 40 languages.

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Even simple charts can tell a story

Even simple charts can tell a story:

Regardless of your politics, this chart is a great example of how data can tell a story. It's a very simple graph by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life showing the changing attitudes about same-sex marriage. It shows that in the past couple of years, people have begun to be in favor of same-sex marriage.
I'm showing this chart because it so clearly represents the story of the data. The eye is immediately drawn to where the "oppose" and "favor" lines cross. Other obvious choices for this data would have been a stacked bar chart or a side by side bar chart as shown here (which I created with the source data just as examples):

These two charts are fine, but they really don't tell the story of what's happening. They merely present the data. The viewer has to take the time to look at each year and detect the year where there's a flip. The flip is much harder to see in these two graphs.
It goes to show that even in the most humble charts, we must choose wisely to convey our message.

Miso: An open source toolkit for data visualisation

Miso: An open source toolkit for data visualisation:
Your online visualization options are limited when you don't know how to program. The Miso Project, a collaboration between The Guardian and Bocoup, is an effort to lighten the barrier to entry.
While the goal is to build a toolkit that makes visualization easier and faster, the first release of the project is Dataset, a JavaScript library to setup the foundation of any good data graphic. If you've ever worked with data on the Web, you know there are a variety of (usually painful) steps you have to go through before you actually get to fun stuff. Dataset will help you with the data transformation and and management grunt work.

One of the most common patterns we've found while building JavaScript-based interactive content is the need to handle a variety of data sources such as JSON files, CSVs, remote APIs and Google Spreadsheets. Dataset simplifies this part of the process by providing a set of powerful tools to import those sources and work with the data. Once data is in a Dataset, it becomes simple to select, group, and calculate properties of, the data. Additionally, Dataset makes it easy to work with real-time and changing data, which pose one of the more complex challenges to data visualization work.

Gonna keep an eye on this one. I'm curious to see how the visualization component starts to build out.