Are you an over-educated college graduate unable to find a job? Then why not spend your time between filling out job applications by taking some free online college courses to keep you well ensconced in your ivory tower! While Stanford may have turned lots of heads with their free, graded online courses, there are quite literally hundreds of other courses available online for free. At least 400 of them, according to Open Culture. They cover everything from History to Computer Science to English to Biology, and everything in between.
But 400 is an awful lot to read through, so we’ve broken down a much shorter list for your reading pleasure.
Here’s Geekosystem’s picks for the some of the more interesting classes. I won’t say the best, because there are dozens of fascinating classes on the list. See the whole list here, and read on below for our carefully organized assortment of free online courses.
Probably as close as you’ll get to Hogwarts
Science, Magic and Religion – Courtenay Raiai, UCLA
The title says it all
The Peculiar Modernity of Britain, 1848-2000 – James Vernon, UC Berkeley
Lesser known reichs
The Rise and Fall of the Second Reich – Margaret Anderson, UC Berkeley
Unlock your word horde
Old English in Context – Stuart Lee, Oxford University
Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre – Oxford
You make it sound so easy!
A Romp through Ethics for Complete Beginners – Marianne Talbot, Oxford University
Astrobiology and Space Exploration – Lynn Rotschild, Stanford
Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple – Hans Bethe, Cornell University
Geometric Folding Algorithms:Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra – Erik Demaine, MIT
Things for which you never thought you’d need instruction
Listening to Music – Professor Craig Wright, Yale
Human Happiness – Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley
Disconcerting
Death – YouTube – iTunes Audio – Shelly Kagan, Yale
Quantum Computing for the Determined – Michael Nielsen, The University of Queensland
Words to win scrabble with
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus – Leo Strauss, U Chicago
The Fourier Transform and its Applications – Brad Osgood, Stanford
Unrelated to the Impending Robot Apocalypse
Artificial Intelligence – Machine Learning – Andrew Ng, Stanford
The Internet, 101
The Future of the Internet – Ramesh Johari, Stanford
Understanding Computers and the Internet – David Malan, Harvard University
The Beauty of Joy of Computing – Professor Daniel Garcia, UC Berkeley
A semester of unintentional penis jokes
Woods Energy Seminar – Multiple Professors, Stanford
Ex-Treme field trips
Exploring Black Holes: General Relativity & Astrophysics – Edmund Bertschinger, MIT
That covers a lot of ground
Ethical Challenges in Public Health Interventions: Catastrophic and Routine – Professor Harvey Kayman, UC Berkeley
(via Open Culture, image via Michael Coghlan)
Published: Nov 22, 2011 12:18 pm