14 ms·

Free Online Courses from Top Universities

392 points by happy-go-lucky 7y ago

ivan_ah 7y ago
Wow that's a nice list! It would be even nicer to have some clear indicator for each course whether it is free as in beer, or free as in freedom (openly licensed and downloadable). For example all the iTunes audio courses say "This course material is only available in the iTunes U app on iPhone or iPad" so limited as to whom can access.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  That some of these courses are only available over iTunes really makes me wonder what the institutions that make this content available only over iTunes are thinking. Surely they realize that not everyone uses iTunes, and putting the content in a walled garden would not make it as available as putting it in a downloadable, open format on archive.org? Or do they just not care?
  - sigjuice 7y ago
    You are absolutely right. There is far more content on YouTube that should really go on archive.org. Here is an unfortunate example from not too long ago. http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw I don't think these videos can be played any more.
    - mkl 7y ago
      Well the video plays for me with SMPlayer, but not the audio. Some .rm files play audio fine. The video quality of these is pretty low though, so hopefully they have a higher resolution master to work from.
mathnmusic 7y ago
We recently imported around 10,000 free MOOCs and categorized them with topics at https://learnawesome.org/ https://learnawesome.org/
- mkl 7y ago
  Looks interesting. You may want to make the "Browse by Topic" view the default, instead of the blank grey screen. I found a dead course link: https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7bc177b5b-numerical-methods-finite-difference-approach https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7b... And a course duplicated 3 times on https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d028000898-numerical-computing https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d0...: Computers, Waves, Simulations: A Practical Introduction to Numerical Methods using Python
  - mathnmusic 7y ago
    Thank you. Fixed all of this. We do have an open issue for this: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/118 https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/118 Hopefully, some fellow HNers might find this an interesting project to hack on and make it better. :-)
tnikolov 7y ago
Great list, well done! I can recommend Andrew Ng for everything on AI subject related. His video "Artificial Intelligence - Machine Learning" is nice introduction to Machine Learning.
rakkhi 7y ago
Tell me uni won’t be different in 20 years. Why would we push our kids to maximise test scores to get a high score on their last year of secondary school (like internet points) instead of teaching them to learn anything? Food for thought and something I have been struggling with lately
- inovica 7y ago
  I fully agree and something that I have been internally debating for around a year now. My son will (potentially) be going to University in two years, but I have heard, from friends, that the amount of contact hours is dramatically reducing. One friend has a son on a 'foundation' course and he has 4 hours of teaching a week. Another, doing a full-time business degree has 9 hours. My own opinion is that with the advances in technology, the old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it. That, coupled with nearly 50% of school leavers going to university now in the UK, makes me feel that the quality is being eroded. Unfortunately, my concern is that if my son doesn't follow the status quo then that will leave him at a disadvantage in the job market. As an employer myself though, I interview a huge number of people who have degrees and who aren't really that capable, so it is very difficult to determine quality.
  - rakkhi 7y ago
    Yes I agree the signaling mechanism of a standard uni degree. At least in IT I see this changing where employers, I have worked at at least, value experience and a portfolio of work more than a uni degree. Also as so many people have uni degrees the value is diminished compared to 50 years ago. What if you just learnt the skills you needed in say 1 year at 20% of the cost online instead and still had a “degree”?
  - christudor 7y ago
    "The old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it." I think most university tutors would find this an insulting caricature of what they and their students do. Is this what you actually think happens at university?
Dowwie 7y ago
Is there a date of publication for this post and updates? This list may seem comprehensive to an outsider but it could be a drop in the bucket since the list was last updated-- possibly years ago. I recommend checking out class-central.com, one of the first MOOC aggregators, for an updated collection.
kick 7y ago
https://edx.org https://edx.org https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm https://oli.cmu.edu/ https://oli.cmu.edu/ https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative https://online.stanford.edu/courses https://online.stanford.edu/courses (This one is kind of but not entirely just an edX front-end now.) Berkeley used to have a treasure trove of free lectures, but then they got sued because they didn't have subtitles, and so took them down. lbry archived most of them: https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued https://oyc.yale.edu/ https://oyc.yale.edu/ https://www.online.caltech.edu/ https://www.online.caltech.edu/ https://ocw.jhsph.edu/ https://ocw.jhsph.edu/
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  You missed Coursera and Udacity I know there are dozens more but I think of Coursera - Udacity - EdX as the big 3.
  - kick 7y ago
    I find them to be substantially lower quality, so I left them out.
    - omarhaneef 7y ago
      Whoah! Okay, counter-point: in my experience Udacity has the highest quality content on the toughest technical subjects. To me, it is evident that an enormous amount of work has gone into making the lectures and exercises effective. Coursera has more courses, and the quality varies more but some of them are excellent. In any case, Coursera lectures come from university partners we are all familiar with, so people can decide if they like the Andrew Ng Machine Learning Class or Geoff Hinton on Neural Networks. I am not affiliated with either of them.
      - 99052882514569 7y ago
        >Geoff Hinton on Neural Networks. Brilliant as a researcher, not so brilliant as a teacher.
Merrill 7y ago
Is there some organization that fact checks these online courses, so that we can know which contain actually valid, true information and which are just some professor's opinion on the subject?
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  > just some professor's opinion A professor who is, say, in an economics department is a person whose opinions on economics have some value. Of course people build up different reputations over time so YMMV, but I'm personally interested in reflecting on what Schiller has to say about the subject.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    "If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion." George Bernard Shaw Shiller is well known, but many of the courses in economics are by professors that are not well known from lesser universities.
- azangru 7y ago
  But who will fact-check the organization, so that we know its checks are actually valid and true and not just some organisation's opinion on the subject? :-)
pietrovismara 7y ago
edx.org is just awesome. When I decided to learn programming I found on it the CS50X course from Harvard, which gave me (4 years ago) a great foundation which then allowed me shortly after to land my first job as dev. I will be always grateful for the quality free content they put online.
BostonFern 7y ago
There's also Academic Earth.
el_benhameen 7y ago
Anyone have a favorite data structures and algorithms course?
- spsphulse 7y ago
  I'm new to data structures and algorithms. Saw this fairly new course from UCSD+HSE mentioned in one of the comments here. I'm finding it pretty interesting. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-alg...
aketchum 7y ago
The majority of classes for Georgia Tech's computer science Masters degree are available online for free on Udacity. I highly recommend the ML and RL courses, as well as the CV course.
- _wldu 7y ago
  +1 It's the top 7th ranked CS program in the world too.
jfengel 7y ago
I was excited to see a class on "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy", though i see it's just an archive of the course material -- lectures and readings. Lectures and readings are great, but it's a far cry from learning what the material really means without the discussion section. MOOCs are good for learning facts-and-figures type things, and it's an OK way to learn the tools of the trade (including the trade of programming). But the thing that makes a top university really "top" is the interaction, challenging your thinking and learning to read and understand closely, not just study a craft. I'm very excited by what they're doing at Signum University[1], which is working on college-level classes without the overhead of a campus. It's not free; you can't really teach an in-depth education for free. But the direction it's going, you'll be able to get all the things that we prize about a four-year college (the things that many employers consider more valuable than somebody who studied at a place like Devry). [1] https://signumuniversity.org/ https://signumuniversity.org/

Wow that's a nice list! It would be even nicer to have some clear indicator for each course whether it is free as in beer, or free as in freedom (openly licensed and downloadable). For example all the iTunes audio courses say "This course material is only available in the iTunes U app on iPhone or iPad" so limited as to whom can access.

pmoriarty 7y ago
That some of these courses are only available over iTunes really makes me wonder what the institutions that make this content available only over iTunes are thinking. Surely they realize that not everyone uses iTunes, and putting the content in a walled garden would not make it as available as putting it in a downloadable, open format on archive.org? Or do they just not care?
- sigjuice 7y ago
  You are absolutely right. There is far more content on YouTube that should really go on archive.org. Here is an unfortunate example from not too long ago. http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw I don't think these videos can be played any more.
  - mkl 7y ago
    Well the video plays for me with SMPlayer, but not the audio. Some .rm files play audio fine. The video quality of these is pretty low though, so hopefully they have a higher resolution master to work from.

mathnmusic 7y ago

We recently imported around 10,000 free MOOCs and categorized them with topics at https://learnawesome.org/ https://learnawesome.org/

mkl 7y ago
Looks interesting. You may want to make the "Browse by Topic" view the default, instead of the blank grey screen. I found a dead course link: https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7bc177b5b-numerical-methods-finite-difference-approach https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7b... And a course duplicated 3 times on https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d028000898-numerical-computing https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d0...: Computers, Waves, Simulations: A Practical Introduction to Numerical Methods using Python
- mathnmusic 7y ago
  Thank you. Fixed all of this. We do have an open issue for this: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/118 https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/118 Hopefully, some fellow HNers might find this an interesting project to hack on and make it better. :-)

tnikolov 7y ago

Great list, well done! I can recommend Andrew Ng for everything on AI subject related. His video "Artificial Intelligence - Machine Learning" is nice introduction to Machine Learning.

rakkhi 7y ago

Tell me uni won’t be different in 20 years. Why would we push our kids to maximise test scores to get a high score on their last year of secondary school (like internet points) instead of teaching them to learn anything? Food for thought and something I have been struggling with lately

inovica 7y ago
I fully agree and something that I have been internally debating for around a year now. My son will (potentially) be going to University in two years, but I have heard, from friends, that the amount of contact hours is dramatically reducing. One friend has a son on a 'foundation' course and he has 4 hours of teaching a week. Another, doing a full-time business degree has 9 hours. My own opinion is that with the advances in technology, the old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it. That, coupled with nearly 50% of school leavers going to university now in the UK, makes me feel that the quality is being eroded. Unfortunately, my concern is that if my son doesn't follow the status quo then that will leave him at a disadvantage in the job market. As an employer myself though, I interview a huge number of people who have degrees and who aren't really that capable, so it is very difficult to determine quality.
- rakkhi 7y ago
  Yes I agree the signaling mechanism of a standard uni degree. At least in IT I see this changing where employers, I have worked at at least, value experience and a portfolio of work more than a uni degree. Also as so many people have uni degrees the value is diminished compared to 50 years ago. What if you just learnt the skills you needed in say 1 year at 20% of the cost online instead and still had a “degree”?
- christudor 7y ago
  "The old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it." I think most university tutors would find this an insulting caricature of what they and their students do. Is this what you actually think happens at university?

Dowwie 7y ago

Is there a date of publication for this post and updates? This list may seem comprehensive to an outsider but it could be a drop in the bucket since the list was last updated-- possibly years ago. I recommend checking out class-central.com, one of the first MOOC aggregators, for an updated collection.

kick 7y ago

https://edx.org https://edx.org https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm https://oli.cmu.edu/ https://oli.cmu.edu/ https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative https://online.stanford.edu/courses https://online.stanford.edu/courses (This one is kind of but not entirely just an edX front-end now.) Berkeley used to have a treasure trove of free lectures, but then they got sued because they didn't have subtitles, and so took them down. lbry archived most of them: https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued https://oyc.yale.edu/ https://oyc.yale.edu/ https://www.online.caltech.edu/ https://www.online.caltech.edu/ https://ocw.jhsph.edu/ https://ocw.jhsph.edu/

omarhaneef 7y ago
You missed Coursera and Udacity I know there are dozens more but I think of Coursera - Udacity - EdX as the big 3.
- kick 7y ago
  I find them to be substantially lower quality, so I left them out.
  - omarhaneef 7y ago
    Whoah! Okay, counter-point: in my experience Udacity has the highest quality content on the toughest technical subjects. To me, it is evident that an enormous amount of work has gone into making the lectures and exercises effective. Coursera has more courses, and the quality varies more but some of them are excellent. In any case, Coursera lectures come from university partners we are all familiar with, so people can decide if they like the Andrew Ng Machine Learning Class or Geoff Hinton on Neural Networks. I am not affiliated with either of them.
    - 99052882514569 7y ago
      >Geoff Hinton on Neural Networks. Brilliant as a researcher, not so brilliant as a teacher.

Merrill 7y ago

Is there some organization that fact checks these online courses, so that we can know which contain actually valid, true information and which are just some professor's opinion on the subject?

jimhefferon 7y ago
> just some professor's opinion A professor who is, say, in an economics department is a person whose opinions on economics have some value. Of course people build up different reputations over time so YMMV, but I'm personally interested in reflecting on what Schiller has to say about the subject.
- Merrill 7y ago
  "If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion." George Bernard Shaw Shiller is well known, but many of the courses in economics are by professors that are not well known from lesser universities.
azangru 7y ago
But who will fact-check the organization, so that we know its checks are actually valid and true and not just some organisation's opinion on the subject? :-)

pietrovismara 7y ago

edx.org is just awesome. When I decided to learn programming I found on it the CS50X course from Harvard, which gave me (4 years ago) a great foundation which then allowed me shortly after to land my first job as dev. I will be always grateful for the quality free content they put online.

BostonFern 7y ago

There's also Academic Earth.

el_benhameen 7y ago

Anyone have a favorite data structures and algorithms course?

spsphulse 7y ago
I'm new to data structures and algorithms. Saw this fairly new course from UCSD+HSE mentioned in one of the comments here. I'm finding it pretty interesting. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-alg...

aketchum 7y ago

The majority of classes for Georgia Tech's computer science Masters degree are available online for free on Udacity. I highly recommend the ML and RL courses, as well as the CV course.

_wldu 7y ago
+1 It's the top 7th ranked CS program in the world too.

jfengel 7y ago

I was excited to see a class on "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy", though i see it's just an archive of the course material -- lectures and readings. Lectures and readings are great, but it's a far cry from learning what the material really means without the discussion section. MOOCs are good for learning facts-and-figures type things, and it's an OK way to learn the tools of the trade (including the trade of programming). But the thing that makes a top university really "top" is the interaction, challenging your thinking and learning to read and understand closely, not just study a craft. I'm very excited by what they're doing at Signum University[1], which is working on college-level classes without the overhead of a campus. It's not free; you can't really teach an in-depth education for free. But the direction it's going, you'll be able to get all the things that we prize about a four-year college (the things that many employers consider more valuable than somebody who studied at a place like Devry). [1] https://signumuniversity.org/ https://signumuniversity.org/