The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) Entrepreneurship Corner (eCorner) is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning. It provides a free collection of over 1600 videos and podcasts, featuring lectures by today’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. There is a lot of interesting material on the site. The topics are: creativity & innovation, opportunity recognition, product development, marketing & sales, finance & venture, capital, leadership & adversity, team & culture, globalization, social entrepreneurship, career & life balance.
Yale Expands Free Online Courses
Ten new college courses — ranging from organic chemistry to ancient Roman architecture to the psychology and politics of food — have been added to “Open Yale Courses,” the University’s free educational initiative, available to anyone with access to the Internet.
Each course, recorded in its entirety as it was presented to Yale College students, is taught by one of the University’s most distinguished faculty members. Open Yale Courses may be accessed at http://oyc.yale.edu.
The courses are available in high definition video and audio formats. All of these offerings are multi-media and provide the fullest experience of the Yale classroom to date, with rich visual elements on the screen, supplementary slide presentations, and extensive music clips, as appropriate. Closed captioning is provided for each course, as well as searchable transcripts, syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets and other materials. Yale has partnered with Google/YouTube and Apple iTunes U to make the courses even more accessible and to allow faster downloads. Open Yale Courses content can be accessed through partner platforms by visiting http://www.youtube.com/yalecourses and http://itunes.yale.edu.
Interested individuals may download the video and/or audio files of Open Yale Courses and watch and listen to them at their convenience. No registration is required for these courses, and participants do not earn academic credit from Yale nor do they interact with the professors.
Open Yale Courses is one of the most frequently visited Yale websites: more than one million unique visitors from 191 countries have accessed the site since its debut in December 2007. Faculty members around the world use content from Open Yale Courses in locations as far-flung as the classrooms of the University of Bahrain, the University of Ghana, Bogazici University in Turkey and the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala. Tec de Monterrey in Mexico has added segments of Open Yale Courses to their “Knowledge Hub,” an index of open education resources that members of Tec’s faculty use in their classrooms. In China, the Ministry of Education has uploaded courses to the Chinese University Outstanding Courses Sharing System, available to students and faculty at all universities in China.
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Bill Gates Brings Feynman Lectures Online
Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science.
The historic lectures and related content can be seen at http://research.microsoft.com/tuva. The name “Tuva” was chosen because of Feynman’s lifelong fascination with the small Russian republic of Tuva, located in the heart of Asia.
Feynman was one of the most popular scientists of the 20th century, equally regarded for his scientific insights as well as his ability to convey his enthusiasm for science through his lectures and writings. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and was also known for his quirky sense of humor and eccentric and wide-ranging interests.
“No one was more adept at making science fun and interesting than Richard Feynman,” said Gates. “More than 20 years after first seeing them, these are still some of the best science lectures I’ve heard. Feynman worked hard during his life to popularize science, so I’m sure he’d be thrilled that now anyone, anywhere in the world, can just click a button and experience his lectures.”
Curtis Wong, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, enhanced the experience of viewing the lectures by integrating the historic video with a Microsoft Silverlight-based video player that allows viewers to search the lectures for references to particular subjects, take notes that are synchronized to the video, and click on hyperlinks to related Web content, among other customized operations.
“There is a lot of public interest in building innovative educational resources online,” Wong said. “This is an opportunity to take some existing educational content and utilize software and the wealth of resources available on the Web to create a richer learning experience. And because people can annotate the lectures with their own comments and links to related resources, I expect this experience to become richer and richer over time.”
Microsoft Research has been exploring video annotation for many years and chose to publish the Feynman “Messenger” lectures with a new enhanced video player. Neither Microsoft nor the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were involved in the acquisition of the rights to the lectures.
Entrepreneurship Podcasts from Stanford
Entrepreneurship Corner (ECorner) is a Stanford University collection of online resources for teaching and learning entrepreneurship. Registration is free and the videos are licensed under a Creative Commons alternative copyright. The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series is a great resource with a lot of very inspiring speeches.
Here you can find it: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
UAF joins OpenCourseWare Consortium
The University of Alaska Fairbanks Center for Distance Education has signed an agreement that will bring UAF courses to a worldwide audience and introduce Alaska students to courses from more than 200 universities and colleges.
Under the agreement, UAF will join the OpenCourseWare Consortium and contribute 10 courses over the next two years. The consortium is a partnership of more than 200 higher education institutions worldwide who make their courses and course materials available free to the public online. (more…)
Think Python: An Introduction to Software Design
“Think Python” by Allen B. Downey is the manuscript of a forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press. The planned publication date is February 2009. This book is a substantially revised version of “How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python”.
Here you can download the book for free: Think Python
Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon
Professor Jim Hefferon’s book Linear Algebra is available as a free document (pdf). It covers the material of a first undergraduate Linear Algebra course. Eric Kidd says in his blog Random Hacks: “Don’t be fooled by the price: Hefferon’s book is better than most of the expensive tomes sold in college bookstores”. Linear Algebra is published under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Share Alike license.
Here you can find the book along with the answers to exercises:
Linear Algebra
Calculus by Gilbert Strang
MIT Open Course Ware has made the textbook Calculus by Professor Gilbert Strang available online. The book was published in 1991 and is still in print from Wellesley-Cambridge Press. It is a very useful resource for educators and self-learners alike. It is well organized, covers single variable and multivariable calculus in depth, and is rich with applications. There is also an online Instructor’s Manual and a student Study Guide.
Here you can find the book: Calculus
Yale Doubles Number of Free Online Courses
Eight new courses in history, economics, literature and biomedical engineering taught by leading faculty have been added to “Open Yale Courses,” the University’s free online education initiative.
The courses, which were recorded in their entirety as they were taught to Yale College students in the classroom, are available in video and audio formats. Closed captioning is offered for each course, and that feature has been added to the seven courses that were made available when the award-winning Open Yale Courses was launched in December 2007. In addition to complete, searchable transcripts, the Internet courses include syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets and other materials.
Anyone may download the video or audio files of Open Yale Courses or watch and listen to them streamed on the web at their convenience. There is no registration required and the courses are not for credit. Open Yale Courses may be accessed at: open.yale.edu/courses
Open Yale Courses is one of the most frequently visited Yale websites, with more than half a million unique visitors from 187 countries having accessed the site since its debut. Faculty members around the world are using Open Yale Courses to teach their students in such locations as the University of Bahrain, the Instituto de Tecnologia de Buenos Aires, Tec de Monterrey in Mexico and Bogazici University in Turkey.
“We are pleased that so many people from around the globe have explored Open Yale Courses, whether they are students, teachers or those who just have a passion for a particular subject,” said President Richard C. Levin. “Making part of the Yale classroom experience accessible beyond the campus through the available technology is a significant emphasis of our growing digital presence.”
The new courses and their instructors are:
- Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering, W. Mark Saltzman (BENG 100)
- Game Theory, Benjamin Polak (Economics 159)
- Financial Markets, Robert Shiller (Economics 252)
- Milton, John Rogers (English 220)
- The American Novel Since 1945, Amy Hungerford (English 291)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, David Blight (History 119)
- Introduction to Ancient Greek History, Donald Kagan (Classics 205)
- France Since 1871, John Merriman (History 276)
“We now offer 15 courses reflecting the broad liberal arts education provided by Yale College to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of the History of Art and Classics and the director of the project. “We are maximizing the use of these courses through a Creative Commons license and our outreach efforts to academic institutions around the world.”
Stanford Engineering Everywhere
The Stanford School of Engineering announced the debut of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), the pilot of a free online service that provides Stanford’s popular introduction to computer science and other computer science and electrical engineering courses. Each consists of complete video lectures and materials such as handouts, assignments, exams and transcripts. With SEE, Stanford Engineering is releasing the courses under a Creative Commons license, explicitly encouraging educators and learners around the world to incorporate the video courses and materials into their educational endeavors and to form virtual communities around the classes.
“We are excited to extend our teaching and learning opportunities worldwide through SEE,” said Jim Plummer, dean of the Stanford Engineering School. “We hope SEE will enable a broad range of people to learn, to share their ideas and to make their own contributions to knowledge.”
The 10 courses, arranged in three subject areas, include one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-quarter introduction to computer science. SEE also offers three courses on artificial intelligence and robotics, and four on linear systems and optimization. The address for SEE is http://see.stanford.edu
“The introductory CS sequence at Stanford provided me so much — programming fundamentals, of course — but more importantly, they provided me many of the basic building blocks that I still use to think about software, products and organizations with today,” said John Lilly, a Stanford CS alumnus (BS 1993, MS 1995) and the CEO of the open source software developer Mozilla Corp. “These classes were among the most useful of my time at Stanford, and I’m really excited to see Stanford making them widely available under a Creative Commons license.”
SEE is produced by the school’s Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), which will use its 40 years of distance education expertise to provide an anywhere/anytime open access learning experience. SCPD executive director Andy DiPaolo said the ease of forming groups on Facebook and sharing information will allow learners to use Stanford engineering courses as a basis to engage with each other in the vital social aspects of learning.
“We want people to learn from it, build on it and share with others using popular social networking tools,” added DiPaolo.
The SEE pilot’s development and launch was funded by Sequoia Captial, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm.
The Creative Commons license allows for non-commercial reuse of the video lectures and materials so long as proper attribution is given. This allows educators and students to download and incorporate the materials into their own work, so long as they acknowledge Stanford and other consenting copyright holders. Any lecture or course materials for which Stanford Engineering was unable to secure a copyright holder’s consent has been omitted from SEE. With that and a few other exceptions, everything offered on SEE is exactly the same as what is offered to enrolled Stanford students. Stanford registration and credit, however, is not available to those taking courses through SEE.
To facilitate easy downloading, the video presentations are available at the SEE Web site and through iTunes, YouTube, Zune, Bit Torrent and Vyew. Videos are in multiple formats to ensure widespread compatibility and a variety of quality and download times.
Part of the technological infrastructure includes access to course-specific Facebook pages. These pages are meant to be self-sustaining user communities, rather than Stanford-moderated groups.
SEE is the latest effort at Stanford to share information and ideas with the public online. Three years ago the university helped pioneer the use of Apple’s iTunes service by academic institutions. Earlier this year Stanford launched a dedicated channel on YouTube. SEE represents Stanford’s first free site to offer complete video-based courses and materials available anywhere, anytime and on-demand.
DiPaolo said expansion of SEE beyond the initial set of offerings will depend on the public response. He said he hopes that educators and students around the globe make the most of these free and easily accessed courses to enhance learning.
“In the industrial age we went to school,” he said. “In the communications age, school comes to us.”