This fall, many teachers (across the country and the world) will be asked to teach online--something most teachers have never done before. To assist with that transition, the Stanford Online High School and Stanford Continuing Studies have teamed up to offer a free online course called Teaching Your Class Online: The Essentials. Taught by veteran instructors at Stanford Online High School (OHS), this course "will help middle and high school instructors move from general concepts for teaching online to the practical details of adapting your class for your students." The course is free and runs from 1-3 pm California time, July 13 - 17. You can sign up here.
For anyone interested, Stanford will also offer additional courses that give teachers the chance to practice teaching their material online and get feedback from Stanford Online High School instructors. Offered from July 20 - July 24, those courses cost $95. Click to this page, and scroll down to enroll.
As every American knows, February is Black History Month. And as every American also knows — if the events of 2020 haven't warped their sense of time too badly — is isn't February right now. But thanks to online learning technology, we all have the freedom to study any subject we want, as much as we want, whenever we want, irrespective of the time of year. Sources of internet-based education have proliferated in the 21st century, but long-respected institutions of higher learning have also got in on the action. Yale University, for example, has produced the online course African American History: Emancipation to the Present, whose 25 lectures by history professor Jonathan Holloway you can watch on YouTube, or at Yale's web site. The first lecture appears above.
Originally recorded in the spring of 2010, Holloway's course examines "the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present," involving such chapters of history as "the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction" and "African Americans’ urbanization experiences."
It also includes lectures on the "thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X" — all writers and thinkers Open Culture readers will have encountered before, but a course like African American History: Emancipation to the Present offers the opportunity to consider their lives and work in clearer context and greater detail.
Black history has deeper roots in some parts of the United States than others. But that doesn't mean the universities of the west have nothing to offer in this department: take, for example, Stanford University's African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle, taught by the historian (and editor of MLK's papers) Clayborne Carson. Available to watch on YouTube and iTunes (or right above), its 18 lectures deliver an introduction to "African-American history, with particular emphasis on the political thought and protest movements of the period after 1930, focusing on selected individuals who have shaped and been shaped by modern African-American struggles for freedom and justice." Taken together, these online courses offer you more than enough material to hold your own Black History Month right now.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The Great Courses has made available a free and rather timely course--Building Your Resilience: Finding Meaning in Adversity. Divided into 24 lectures and taught by Molly Birkholm, the course gets introduced with the following text:
Recent research shows that we grow into our best and most joyful selves not when we avoid our problems but when we embrace them, confident that we are resilient enough to work through them to an appropriate resolution. Our problems are an important part of our path.
Resilience is our ability to physically, emotionally, and mentally bounce back from adverse circumstances. Without it, we would be down for the count every time we ran into a problem. Stuck in traffic and late for a meeting? It’s your resilience that allows you to make the necessary phone calls and keep moving forward, confident that you can handle this stressful situation as it evolves. Without it, you’d make a U-turn and give up. Recovering from the flu or recent surgery? It’s your resilience that helps you take care of yourself appropriately and look forward to a better future. Our capacity to thrive in life depends directly on our resilience.
Sharing her own fascinating journey, as well as the latest research by neurologists and psychologists, trauma specialist Molly Birkholm shows us how to gauge our current level of resilience and improve from there. In Building Your Resilience: Finding Meaning in Adversity, you’ll learn how all of our challenges—from everyday stresses to life-altering traumas—can bring wisdom and growth. In 17 fascinating classes and 7 “hands-on” practice sessions, you’ll learn about and experience the process of building the inner calm and clarity of mind that create greater resilience. With Ms. Birkholm’s warm and optimistic demeanor, you’ll feel her encouragement every step of the way as you move toward building your best and most fulfilling life.
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A quick heads up. Through the end of April, Nikon has made its curriculum of online photography courses free. Normally priced at $15-$50 per course, this 10-course offering covers Fundamentals of Photography, Dynamic Landscape Photography, Macro Photography, Photographing Children and Pets, and more. Sign up for the courses here.
Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere.
Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook andTwitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.
Over the past decade or two, developments in the technology of the World Wide Web have made learning at home possible in a way it wasn't before. Over the past month or two, learning at home has gone from option to necessity, prevented as many of us are from going out to a classroom by the coronavirus pandemic. If you've taken courses on the internet before — and especially if you've picked them from our selection of 1,500 you can take for free — you've no doubt heard of Coursera, one of the major online learning platforms. Now through May 31st, a period during which the number of potential students will surely remain high, Coursera has made more of its classes free for the taking.
"To help our community during this critical time, we’re launching new, free resources, as well as surfacing interesting course collections, community discussions, and expert interviews," says the official Coursera blog. "While many courses on Coursera are already available for free without a certificate, this promotion enables you to not only access lectures and quizzes, but also to earn a free certificate for courses that offer them." The blog highlights these collections of courses, describing them as follows:
Free online courses for mental health and well-being: from de-mystifying mindfulness to understanding the science of happiness, we’ve collected top wellness courses to help you prioritize mental health and well-being during these uncertain times.
Free online courses in Spanish: from wellness to professional development, we’re making popular Spanish-language courses available for free.
The post also includes the following instructions for how to redeem a free course:
First, click the link to visit a promotion page.
From the promotion page, click to visit a specific course and wait for the page to fully load. Once loaded, you will see a promotion banner at the top of the page. If you don’t see the banner, please refresh the page.
Next, click the "Enroll for free" button.
Select "Purchase Course." Note that with the promotion applied, there will be a message in parentheses that says "Your promotion will automatically be applied at checkout."
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The term philosophy, as every introductory course first explains, means the love of wisdom. And as the oldest intellectual discipline, philosophy has proven that the love of wisdom can withstand the worst human history can throw at it. Civilizations may rise and fall, but sooner or later we always find ways to get back to philosophizing. The current coronavirus pandemic, the most frightening global event most of us have seen in our lifetimes, doesn't quite look like a civilization-ender, though it has forced many of us to change the way we live and learn. In short, we're doing much more of it online, and a new collection of educational videos free online is keeping philosophy in the mix.
You'll find an abundance of introductory courses to the entire subject of philosophy as well as to subfields like logic and ethics, and also specialized lecture series on everything from Hume and Nietzsche to Stoicism and metaphysics to death and the problem of evil.
Weinberg adds that "anyone can add their own videos or ones that they know about," so if you're aware of any video philosophy courses that haven't appeared on the spreadsheet yet, you can contribute to this ongoing effort in at-home philosophy by inserting them yourself. Even as it is, Jackson and Goldshmidt's course collection offers more than enough to give yourself a rich philosophical education in this time of isolation — or, if you're a philosophy professor yourself, a way to enrich any remote teaching you have to do right now. Putting as it does so close at hand lectures by such figures previously featured here on Open Culture as Nigel Warburton, Michael Sandel, Peter Adamson, and the inimitable Rick Roderick, it reminds us that the love of wisdom is best expressed in a variety of voices.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain may or may not have actually said that, but either way the sentiment resonates — and with a new strength now, since schools have closed all over the world in an attempt to halt the spread of the pandemic coronavirus. For many, this period of isolation (self-imposed or otherwise) represents an opportunity to rediscover the value of education: not the kind directed by an institution, but the much more valuable kind that runs on one's own steam. If you count among that select group of self-educators (or educators of children whom you can no longer send to school), we here at Open Culture have spent nearly the past decade and a half amassing just the resources you need.
Should you prefer reading through earphones while exercising or cleaning — especially important activities these days — we can also offer you more than a thousand free audiobooks, whether you prefer Isaac Asimov or Jane Austen, Adrienne Rich or Charles Bukowski. (You can also get audiobooks from Audible if you sign up for a free 30-day trial there.)
While quarantine puts a temporary stop to many of our usual activities, it shouldn't get in the way of movie night. Our collection of 1,1500 free movies will cover all your movie nights through the time of the coronavirus and then some, including as it does classic films noirs, thriller and horror pictures (including some by no less a suspense master than Alfred Hitchcock), documentaries, and even the fruits of the film industries of countries like Russia and South Korea. And though we can't get enough cinema here at Open Culture, it's hardly the only visual art form we feature: you might spend some time, for instance, with this collection of two million images from 30 world-class museums. This range of art also appears in free museum-produced coloring books geared to all ages.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
