In lieu of new Daily Video links today (I’ll leave yesterday’s up), I’ve decided to do a post on some interesting video sources. The key to this post is that I like to learn. No, I love to learn. I can’t stop myself. The internet, in it’s ever-evolving attempts to disseminate knowledge to the far corners of the Earth, has brought to my attention a few excellent resources for learning more than you could ever want to know about the world and the ideas that shape it. Check out my short list after the jump.
1. Open Yale Courses
With a focus mostly on the Liberal Arts, the Yale online courses are great for very specific subjects in each of their offered fields. Of course, you’re getting some quality teaching, because it’s Yale. I haven’t cracked into the hard sciences yet (and yes I consider Psychology to be one of them since there is empirical evidence collected), but I plan to. Each course is so well presented and provides excellent course materials on top of the video and audio lectures. This is definitely the best place to go if you ever wanted to attend an Ivy League school but never quite had the cash, connections, or GPA.
2. MIT OpenCourseWare
With over 1800 courses offered, you will never run out of things to learn from MIT. The drawback is that most of it is text, and not audio or video. I mean, what can you expect from that many courses? But still the course material is highly detailed, and unlike Yale there is a wide variety of subject matter available. There is probably a course on practically anything that you could ever want to know. Thanks to MIT being a pure research institution, they get to test and talk about all the things in existence. They pass on the savings to you! But really, there is so much information on this one site that your head will probably explode a la Scanners. I apologize in advance for being an accomplice in killing you with knowledge.
3. Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Covering just the hard sciences (and French for some reason), the Open Learning Initiative courses are presented in a little more friendly manner than the MIT catalog. The subjects are fewer, but there is still some great information to be had. And the way the courses are laid out really is more efficient. I like that they set goals for each module. Things like that help me stay on track and gauge how well I’m absorbing and understanding the material.
4. TED Talks
I link to these all the time, and with good reason. They take the most creative and influential minds in the world and bring them together to talk about their passions. I learn more from these 15-20 minute talks than I do from reading all day on the internet. One of the reasons that most of these people are so famous in their fields is that they are excellent at explaining what it is that they do, and why it’s important to the world. You can’t get ideas much bigger than that. Once you’ve learned about the underpinnings of the world from the other three sites, you can come to TED and learn why the world matters.
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