Educating Yourself

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So I discovered this a couple years ago:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Berkeley basically puts a lot of its freshman and sophomore classes--general education, mostly--up on the web as webcasts. They're not captioned, but the sound quality is passable in most cases; so basically I have a dozen or so classes "audited" in this fashion.

So, questions:
Does anybody else do this kind of thing?
And do you know of other universities that also make their classes open to the public like this? I'm running out of subjects I'm interested in!

I think I can relate. When I find a series or videogame that I'm interested in, I will go on Wikipedia binges for hours doing research on the characters, the story, the art, etc. Does that sound about the same to you?

Unfortunately, I haven't a clue where to find more webcasts like that. To google!

Callista, that is a terrific website, thank you!

I haven't taken any of them myself, but MIT also offers free courses online:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

I think you want the Open CourseWare Consortium:
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
You can also try googling the term - open courseware - and you'll get results from various universities. MIT, Harvard, etc., although you might get others, since Google's results are now skewed by location.

Enjoy!

that's great Berkley posts whole courses, i wish more universities did.

TVO, the Canadian version of PBS holds a national lecturer competition each year. They are only general general overture lectures, but some are quite good. One of my profs did a great civil engineering / architectural history lecture, but they don't seem to host it any more.

http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?videolist?TVO_BestLecturer2010_Final

Though it probably won't work in the US.

Great links, all. Thanks! I've been currently self-educating myself on the political philosophies of justice through an MIT open course class.

Here's my link to add to the pile:
You Tube University
http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400

No classes, but lots of great lectures. I really enjoyed one on poltical economy I watched a couple of months ago.

Interesting - I live by Berkeley and I always wanted to go there but my grades suck.

Looks like I have some new listening material for my weekly runs.

http://www.academicearth.org/

If you have iTunes, there's a search filter (on the left side) called "iTunes U." I.e. I put "neurology" in the search box and gives entries from Princeton, Yale, McGill, U of Arizona, and Miami Dade College.

It is a really cool idea. And for people like me who aren't after credits/credentials it's thousands of dollars' worth of lectures for free.

Definitely worth a try if you've got broadband......it's got to be better than attending a crowded real-life lecture with the teacher talking too fast and not making sense. Also they can't force you to work harder or faster than your natural pace. Only problem I can see is that it might not be possible to ask the authors any questions......but there are lots of specialist Web forums that can answer questions, and you'll possibly get better answers from them than you would from the original author who might doggedly stick to a flawed assertion just to maintain credibility.

Personally I get bored with set courses because there's always a lot of stuff I already know or don't need to know, so I end up reading loads of stuff for no good reason. I'd rather just dream up a question and get a good answer to it.

Don't forget your local library - those places don't just have books these days, they've often got lots of other formats, and the staff are often very helpful, in my experience. One thing I really like about my job is that I'm allowed access to the whole university library, and what they don't have isn't worth knowing. None of this "return after 2 weeks" nonsense either - usually you can keep the book for several months unless somebody else needs it.

Thanks for the link, Calista. It could be really useful.
I listen a lot to audios while I work or during commutes. Might as well learn things.

I am taking a MIT course, I´m in lecture 9. Also there are Leonard Susskind´s Physics classes at Stanford: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind (Scroll down to Lectures!! !). I watched some of those too.

The Stanford Youtube site is very disorganized and contain course lectures with other general lectures: if you want to venture: http://www.youtube.com/stanford (you have to scroll down a lot till you find the class lectures).