10 World Class Educational Sites

An article by Amit Roushan    5 Comments

Harvard, MIT, Yale just these names would make your resumes look so much more attractive. Everybody wants to get the best but not everyone manages to do so. Entries to do these colleges are very reserved and till now, how the students at these institutions partake their educations has largely remained mystical to the unlucky ones on the outside. But this is slowly changing thanks to the Internet and the collaborative efforts of these respected Institutes.The secrets of how brilliant minds are groomed and taught to rule the world are slowly being unveiled. Organizations such as OCW have brought up programs like OpenCourseWare to help all the student worldwide get the very best in education.

An OpenCourseWare is a collection of audio and video lectures delivered at the prestigious universities. These lectures can be presented as podcasts, pdf files, word documents for public viewing and can be downloaded free of cost in all available audio and video formats, anytime and from anywhere via the internet. Recently OCW Consortium celebrated the 10th anniversary of OCW announcement which shows their commitment in providing quality education free of cost.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One of the most premier and widely recognized education center in the world, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is considered to be the pioneer of OpenCourseWare and has the most exhaustive OpenCourseWare collection. There are around 2000 courses available under various domains like Engineering, Humanities, Management, Science, Architecture and many more. MIT offers lecture notes, exams and classroom videos. Moreover, they have translated courses that are available in several languages. It is also one of the most trusted brand name when it comes to education.

Tufts University

Tufts University is worth mentioning when it comes to OpenCourseWare for medical studies. Tufts has a wide-range of free contents regarding Health Sciences which include Medicine and Dental. An active member of the OCW consortium, Tufts University has been providing free medical education throughout the world. Apart from medicine, people can also learn Blender 3D design and Geographic Information System from Tufts OpenCourseWare.

Utah State University

Utah State University under the OCW consortium, has initiated their opencourse known as the Utah State Opencourseware which is a collection of educational material used in their formal class. These videos provides students around the world to access quality learning opportunities.

Stanford University

Stanford runs a program called Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) under which it provides some of its more popular Engineering courses free of cost. Students can watch the lecture videos, read the course handouts and take quizzes. Stanford also has a provision of online social networking with fellow SEE students. One should keep in mind that the downloaded course can only be views via iTunes.

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University has its project, open learning initiative to facilitate students worldwide to provide open and free courses. There are different courses for students and instructors. These courses are well arranged under various topics. Carnegie Mellon has also initiated the idea of virtual labs and intelligent tutoring systems to help students and revolutionize education.

University of Michigan

Open.Michighan, the openCourseWare of University of Michigan started back in 2007 partnering with several other health sciences schools. Open.Michigan is quite different to other OpenCourseWare as it helps people find,use and create openly licensed content and also provide them a space to share new content. In this way they provide help and also develop themselves. They also have open projects and resources where people actively engage to create a hub that helps them forming a social network to learn and grow. The university also has a collection of openly licensed educational resources (OER) which is free to download. These include course materials to videos to softwares.
Open.Michgan is a full-blown U-M initiative.

Yale university

Yale University has also shown its concern regarding opencourse. As a result, it has started providing free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished scholars at Yale university. The course provided by Yale University is on various topics but are limited. These courses are available on iTunes to download for free.

University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine launched its OpenCourseWare initiative in 2006 and became the first UC campus to join the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Since then it has grown rapidly adding 10 new courses every month according to the campus website. The OpenCourseWare provided by UCI also focuses on working adults seeking continuing education along with several undergraduate and graduate courses.<

National Programme Technology Enhanced Learning

 National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is an collaborative educational programme  funded by the Government of India. NPTEL consists of lecture videos from the 7 highly reputed Indian Institute of  Technology (IITs) and IISC Bangalore. It provides free online course on Engineering, Science and Humanities.  NPTEL has a huge collection of videos on different topics. It’s worth giving a try.

KhanAcademy

Salman Khan, the man behind Khan Academy, was helping his cousin by uploading videos on Youtube. After few of his videos was posted, he found out he was not only helping his cousin but a lot of people on the Internet. Hence, that was how it started. Today, Khan Academy is an organization on a mission to provide world-class education to everyone everywhere. There are more than 2500 videos on Maths, Science, Humanities, History and many more.

My personal experience with Khan Academy has been fantastic. It is one of the most prolific place to learn and understand complicated ideas in a simple manner. Getting a reward of $2m from Google and an appreciation from Bill gates also speaks volumes about the reputation and standard of Khan Academy.

For more, visit: www.ocwconsortium.org