Non-university distance learning

So if the goal of gaining knowledge were not also obtaining some type of university degree, what options are available out there which are purely on-line? In other words, if someone were interested in learning for learning's sake (but definitely didn't want to work toward a degree or even be in a graded environment), where would you send them?


Tom Nixon

 

Tom, there are so many online learning sources out there, I don't think I could answer that one until I knew what type of learning somebody was looking for.

 

I should have mentioned that I was asked this question today by someone who already has a Ph.D. (in history) and is not at all interested in traditional education (for himself).

I get the impression that he wants to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. In the past he has talked about computers and business, so this could be a place to start. Religion would be another area of interest.

Also, feel free to tell us about your two or three best choices for online learning in any field. What I'm planning on doing is cutting and pasting whatever we come up with here (as well as elsewhere) and letting him sort it out.


Tom Nixon

 

By the way, I told Jim (my friend) about this neat new invention that they have called libraries! Pretty much learn anything you wnat in one. He is specifically looking for on-line programs which he will supplement with the university library.


Tom Nixon

 

California State U Dominguez Hills has posted the content of its entire Humanities External Degree on the web, including the contents of over 30 course guides. Quite an extensive resource. Conceivably, one could work through everything without ever contacting the school, and get quite an education free of charge. Socrates would approve.

Info at:
http://www.csudh.edu/hux/crsdesc.html

- Phillip M. Perry

 

Wow, what a great resource -- thanks for posting the URL. The course guides look very interesting and very well organized -- they could serve as models for people developing courses, as well as a guide to self study.

Maybe not. Like many teachers, Socrates was suspicious of new technology. He questioned the usefulness of writing and did not regard it as the medium for instruction or truth-seeking. http://distancelearn.about.com/library/timeline/bl360.htm?terms=socrates



------------------
Kristin Evenson Hirst
DistanceLearn.About.com

 

If he's a Ph.D. in history, he probably already knows everything I'm going to say. But since it might be valuable to distance education students in need of library resources, I'll say it anyway.

One place to start is looking at on-line course materials. A place that collects links to a huge number of on-line courses in every imaginable subject is the World Lecture Hall:

http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/

Some of them are just lame little one page syllabi. But others are the real thing, containing full lecture text, on-line readings and extensive links. It's like taking a university course for free.

Then there are the links pages. They exist in every imaginable subject and some of them are very good. I'm personally interested in religion (conceived broadly) and I find Rutgers' links useful. Scroll down a bit to the extensive list of topics at:

http://religion.rutgers.edu/vri/index.html

For those interested in a scholarly study of the Bible, these links are pretty good:

http://www.hivolda.no/asf/kkf/rel-stud.html

There are numerous on-line journals. In religion, the U. of Marburg in Germany puts out several (in English) that take the sort of approach to religion I like.

http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/

For a large general listing of journals with at least some on-line presence, some just abstracts, others full-text, try:

http://info.lib.uh.edu/wj/alpha.html

Then there are on-line texts. In the field of early Christianity, you simply can't beat:

http://cedar.evansville.edu/~ecoleweb/

They have stuff that's impossible to find anywhere else. Translations of all the apostolic fathers, apologists, creeds, patristic writings etc.

Another place to snoop around is university departments. They often have their own links pages, usually restricted to good scholarly resources without the ever-present internet flakiness. Look at individual faculty webpages. These people often post their favorite links as well as their own papers and talks. Sometimes this is unpublished stuff available nowhere else. In religion, a department I'm very fond of (one of the best in the world) is:

http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/

See their links page. The stuff under 'centers' and 'journals' is useful.

There are also a variety of specialized on-line encyclopedias. One that maintains a very high level of scholarship is the slowly growing Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html

The articles here are long, detailed and state of the art. Many are relevant to religion.

Another resource is Degreeinfo's old friend:

http://www.google.com

If you are interested in a late Roman author or something equally obscure, do a google-search and see what webpages mention your figure.

This post is probably getting too long so I'll stop. But the point is that there are dozens, even hundreds of options in each category. Each one will give you links to lots more stuff and it grows exponentially.

While I have used religion as an illustration, you can find similar resources in any field. Start with something lame and obvious like Yahoo. Let it lead you to a better quality specialized scholarly links page in your field. Then follow those links, prune what is useless and save the links that you find valuable.

 

I predict that this thread will be the most useful on degreeinfo. Thanks for asking.

This has been posted before, but MIT made a big splash about making their entire curriculum available on the web. That will be a two-year task to provide a common interface. However, much of the faculty already does this ad hoc...class notes, labs, exams, etc. They're at http://mit.edu/is/courseweb/courses.html (moved since the original posting).

Many universities do this. If you do a google search for the desired topic (say, "abstract algebra class notes"), he'll probably find more information than he wants.

SATS/Zululand's theology degree programs are very inexpensive. A year's full-time tuition is about $500. USD. At SATS, courseware can be downloaded or emailed. The SATS administrator might make a special arrangement for auditing. ([email protected]) I have not spoken to him about this.

Here is a free school of theology in India, but I know little about it: http://members.truepath.com/apologetics2000/

 

Certainly some good ideas. How about education run online by companies? I know there is definitely some in computers. What other options are there?


Tom Nixon

 

via http://www.uk-learning.net/ these two links:

1) http://www.essaybank.co.uk/
"...hundreds of pages of high quality essays, projects and coursework reports, all contributed by students for students, categorised by syllabus and searchable."

2) http://www.sldb.co.uk/
"...thousands of study and student links"

Hmmm... $15 registration fee per term, Virtual University: http://vu.org

Free undergraduate computer science program (ArsDigita) that lost its funding but still publishes all lecture notes. http://aduni.org/

Collection of computer science lecture notes: http://www.intelinfo.com/cat3.html

Don't make an illegal a passant past this if you want to learn chess from grandmasters, free lessons and a $50/term supercourse. http://www.chesswise.com/

stuff http://www.free-ed.net/

tech: http://www.beginners.co.uk/

Annoying BB Admins:
I am teaching a FREE master seminar entitled, "How to Annoy Bulletin Board Administrators." Some of the classes include: 1) finding their hot buttons, 2) walking on the edge of deletion, 3) undetectable alternate identities, 4) provoking others to do your bidding, 5) writing irritating but ambiguous postings that can be defended in a pinch, and 6) finding a good lawyer.

 

Great stuff, Bill. I have forwarded this entire page to my friend. If anyone else has other options (in whatever area floats your boat), I think that it would benefit all of our readers.


Tom Nixon

 

Project Gutenburg (no nasty, dusty p-books (paper books) http://promo.net/pg/

Charmin University...just in case
...free potty training (bachelor o fArts) www.babycenter.com/pottytrain/product.jhtml

Overview of Training and Development (for new instructors, learners, supervisors, etc.)
(Extensive) http://www.mapnp.org/library/trng_dev/trng_dev.htm

We're from the government and we're here to help....Actually, it's pretty good http://www.ed.gov/free/subject.html

computer cert. ($10./course) http://www.freeacademy.com/default.php

Welcome to the Linux Training Materials Project. This site has the following basic objectives: to distribute free, high quality, linux training materials under an open source licence.... http://www.linuxtraining.co.uk/

Computer Education, Training, and Tutorial Resources http://www.intelinfo.com/

Stuff http://www.computersandtraining.com/

 

These are great resources! Thanks to everyone for posting them.

 

For an amazing number of catalogued links in the humanities, the Voice of the Shuttle at UCSB.

------------------
Bill Gossett

 

- - Media - -
The MIT Media Laboratory (looks line one of the coolest places to study) http://www.media.mit.edu/ go to 'Research' and browse or download the research projects list

- - Sociology - -
Julian Dierkes' Sociology Links (formerly of Princeton) http://www.sociolog.com/

- - Drama, theatre links at Exeter - - http://www.ex.ac.uk/drama/links.html

- - Classics at Cambridge - - http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/Faculty/links.html

- - Performing Arts links at Juilliard - - http://www.juilliard.edu/library/links.html

- - Biology links at Harvard - - http://golgi.harvard.edu/BioLinks.html

- - Chemistry - -
University of Liverpool Links for Chemists http://www.liv.ac.uk/Chemistry/Links/links.html ,
the chemistry section of http://www.vlib.org/ (www virtual library)
http://www.thecatalyst.org/ Chemistry links for teachers (secondary)

- - Physics - -
Physics at MIT
History of Physics: http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/r/e/redingtn/www/netadv/hist.html

Physics http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/r/e/redingtn/www/netadv/welcome.html

- - Econonics links - -
at Duke (Dukenomics): http://www.econ.duke.edu/Quicklinks/econ.quicklinks.html

at Univ. of Michigan: http://www.lib.umich.edu/grad/collections/classes/econ.html

- - Aerospace - -
At NASA: http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/facts/aerospace.html

Archimedes Institute (policy wonks): http://www.permanent.com/archimedes/ArchimedesLinks.html

- - Political Science - -
At Vanderbilt: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/~rtucker/polisci/

At Keele Univ.: http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/

- - Anthropology - -
at CSU Hayward: http://isis.csuhayward.edu/alss/anth/links.html

 

If anyone is interested in becoming a virtual literary classicist, classical archaeologist, historian or art historian, the Perseus Project is worth checking out.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

This thing is a pretty amazing collection of some 40,000 pages, including images, description and commentary on Greek and Roman buildings, archaelogical sites, sculpture, pottery, coins and so on. It has hundreds of Greek and Latin texts and English translations, plus all kinds of Greek and Latin grammars, dictionaries and lexica. It also has a number of full-text books including a history of classical Greece hyperlinked to the collection, that serves as kind of an index.

A fascinating side of this thing is Duke's collection of high-resolution images of hundreds of mostly Egyptian papyri from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. You have to be able to read Greek, but if you can there is some pretty interesting stuff here, such as the Nag Hammadi texts.

Unfortunately the site is a poorly designed and confusing labyrinth. Finding something isn't easy.

But if you can figure it out, it's a promising example of how DL can provide primary source material for research that no single academic library could provide.