
Open Education Resources - nprincigalli
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/05/10-open-education-resources-you-may-not-know-about-but-should/
======
eftpotrm
I have to admit an interest in this as I work for them, but the Open
University (<http://www.open.ac.uk/>) do have _quite a lot_ of material
online....

<http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/>

<http://open.edu/itunes/>

<http://www.youtube.com/user/oulearn>

~~~
danohuiginn
That _is_ a lot of material. Thanks.

minor grumble: why, why, WHY do so many universities put their content on
ItunesU, thus making it all but inaccessible for those of us not already using
apple software.

Even dumping a pile of MP3s on a server somewhere would make your material
much more accessible.

~~~
Turing_Machine
iTunes U is essentially just a directory service for the convenience of iTunes
users.

The actual content is in fact still stored on the school's server, just as you
say -- a very common way of populating iTunes U is through RSS feeds from some
internal system (not necessarily Apple-based).

If the content is free, there's no reason why they shouldn't make it available
through alternate links/feeds. You could try complaining to the person in
charge. :-)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Possibly of interest (I haven't tried these myself):

[http://www.ubuntugeek.com/tunesviewer-itunes-university-
medi...](http://www.ubuntugeek.com/tunesviewer-itunes-university-media-and-
podcasts-in-linux.html)

[http://www.fritscher.ch/blog/2009/05/13/browsing-itunesu-
wit...](http://www.fritscher.ch/blog/2009/05/13/browsing-itunesu-without-
intalling-itunes/)

~~~
danohuiginn
aha! they look _very_ useful (assuming they work). Thanks so much :)

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buckwild
I can't believe they didn't mention Khan Academy.

~~~
nprincigalli
They do, first link in the 4th paragraph. Noticed now that Academic Earth (
<http://academicearth.org/> ) is missing, tho.

~~~
astrofinch
Same for <http://videolectures.net/>

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mindcrime
A couple of the best resources I know of are actually on Reddit, in sub-
reddits dedicated to cataloging freely available textbooks in various fields:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/eebooks>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/physicsbooks>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/econbooks>

And, of course, there is this classic site:

[http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...](http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html)

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barry-cotter
Pap. If you know Opencourseware exists there are two things worth learning on
that page, ck-12 and flat world knowledge make freely downloadable textbooks.

Not worth your time.

~~~
gbrindisi
Clickables:

<http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/>

<http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/>

~~~
pasbesoin
That's one lame "Javascript is off" warning, on the former.

Degrade gracefully, and let the client see something of what you have to
offer. They might actually decide it's worth their while, and gather
sufficient trust, to enable Javascript.

~~~
Groxx
I understand the complaint completely, but be sure to look at it from a
cost/benefit viewpoint as well. People with JS off are likely _significantly_
less than 1% of their users. They would likely benefit more from supporting
IE6, and maybe IE5, than supporting JS-off.

~~~
pasbesoin
It's a redirect to a warning page. If you pause the load (Escape key) before
the redirect, the initial/front page is plenty visible and ok looking.

I keep JS disabled because there's just too much random/nasty cr*p out there.
I'll do JS for some sites, but it's definitely "opt-in", for me.

Yeah, I'm a corner case. I just found the deliberate redirect away from a
presentable page (with JS disabled) to a content-devoid warning/advisory, to
be rather pointless, from my perspective.

~~~
Groxx
hah, yeah, that's pretty annoying. I prefer un-announced failure to drop-
everything-and-berate-user. I didn't realize it was _that_ bad, I retract my
earlier remark - this likely cost them additional time to be _more_ annoying
(though was probably done for people on ancient browsers, and not voluntary
no-JS-ers).

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jasonmcalacanis
The progress in free education is astounding.

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huherto
I am testing learnboost.com to manage a class. It works ok. But I have found a
couple of wrinkles. I hope it is just a matter of time.

