posted on January 21, 2007 7:33 PM
Open Culture: University Podcast Collection
Massive Resource List for All Autodidacts
Berkeley on iTunes U - entire courses available online, requires iTunes
These sites are goldmines for the autodidact types, of which I is one. I just loaded up my iPod with some special lectures from Boston College, Yale, and Princeton. I also loaded up the following courses (the lectures for the entire semester) from UC Berkeley's iTunes service: Introductory Physics, Introduction to General Astronomy, General Biology, Operating Systems and System Programming, Introduction to Chemistry, and General Human Anatomy. I also got a course on Quantum Mechanics (Is it a wave? Or a particle?) from UC Davis. According to iTunes, this adds up to a total of 6 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes, and 28 seconds of me gettin' my learn on.
The only problem I have with the UC Berkeley service is that, while they have a good representation of courses in, for example, the Physical Sciences and a large selection of special events and speakers, there is almost no representation of The Three Rs. There are two courses dealing with contextualized Literature studies (Man, God, and Society in Western Literature and Existentialism in Literature and Film*) but no courses dealing with any general English or Literature subjects. And I found no Maths of any kind. Most likely this is due to these subjects being difficult to translate into the pure audio (it would be difficult through the medium of audio to see the example problems in a math class which the professor is writing on the blackboard) and so they stick with subjects that work best in the lecture format.
*I just went back and saw that both of these, which are in the Arts & Humanities section, are prefixed with Phil. which I assume means they are considered Philosophy courses.
Your comments are most welcome. Please send them to jay at jayprickett dot com