
Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise  - mcormier
I recently finished a great course on iTunes university on the history of architecture.  Bricks and mortar architecture not software.  Now I&#x27;m searching for another good course.<p>I also have a yearly training budget at work that I&#x27;ve never gotten around to using.  If you had a yearly training budget what would you use it for?
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VLM
I love audio courses and lecture series and since the 90s I've listened to
them during my commute and pretty much any time I didn't have to listen to
anything else (exercise, yard work, whatever). I was classically educated so
if I think Plutarch in audiobook form or a philosophy course is entertaining,
thats because I'm unusual, not because thats all that is out there.

"The Teaching Company" has rebranded to "The Great Courses" and they produce
uniformly great product. Your local public library probably has shelves of
their physical products under both names, probably. Mine has more than one
bookcase of audiobooks and also the dvd form of some lectures. How you
interpret "fair use" once you get your mitts on physical media is your own
dilemma. Somehow I got on their mailing list and all I can say is never pay
retail, because just like a department store, in a rotation pattern, 25% of
the store is on sale for 90% off at any given time. I'm told their products
are available to Audible subscribers, but not being an audible subscriber I
don't know. I have probably listened to dozens of their courses over the last
few decades and never been disappointed.

There are a surprising number of courses only available officially on itunes.
Bulliet's "History of Iran" from Columbia U is beyond excellent, I listened to
it a couple years ago and I don't remember how I "cracked it" such that my
android podcast player had access, I remember it was a huge PITA but worth the
effort.

Must be nice to have a training budget. Those disappeared from all my F500
sized megacorp employers in the 90s. Back when we had them, they were awesome.
Right around the time those budgets disappeared, we mostly bought
subscriptions to the new "Safari" service which was very interesting reading.

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brudgers
Peter Singer - arguably (not that I want an argument) the most important
philosopher of the past forty years - will be teaching Practical Ethics on
Coursera.

[https://www.coursera.org/course/practicalethics](https://www.coursera.org/course/practicalethics)

~~~
frigg
I subscribed to this course. I also recommend Moralities of everyday life by
Paul Bloom which I'm currently taking and it's great. A Beginner's Guide to
Irrational Behavior[1] starts soon and from reviews it looks like a great
course.

[1]
[https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon](https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon)

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eswat
Although I think I get enough knowledge about food from reading PubMed and
other links from the paleo community, I’m finding the Food for Thought course
from McGill on edX [1] to be an interesting perspective on diet + chemistry.

I may not agree with everything but it’s a nice refresher and it’s certainly
the kind of course that more people should take; not enough people know enough
about the food they put in their mouths.

[1] [https://www.edx.org/course/mcgillx/mcgillx-chem181x-food-
tho...](https://www.edx.org/course/mcgillx/mcgillx-chem181x-food-thought-1213)

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MaggiD
This is considered to be one of the best courses on Coursera:
[https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon](https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon)

------
achlamabach
Coursera

~~~
VLM
I've completed one course (why I bothered I don't know) and I've subscribed to
and watched all the videos of a couple courses, and they have an absolute
fixation on video even when its completely unnecessary, the videos tend to be
very short, and have constant quiz interruptions. So its not going to fly as
something you consume while doing something else, like driving or riding a
bike or yardwork or shoveling snow or hiking or whatever. Have to stop what
you're doing and fumble with the phone for half a minute, every five minutes.

If someone would rip the videos off Coursera, strip out the unneeded video,
concatenate, and upload to archive.org it could work out pretty well.

~~~
mcormier
Thanks, that is very helpful. I like to listen to courses while I'm making
breakfast in the morning. A bunch of quizzes would be quite annoying.

~~~
brudgers
The quizzes only show up when flash is used to display the video. Even then
they are useful in my opinion.

