So long and fairwell. Thanks to the guys at OEDB for inviting me to write here. It’s been a fun two months and I hope you readers have enjoyed these posts. If you’re looking for more good posting on free educational resources, visit Stingy Scholar where I’ll continue to post. Two other excellent, regularly updated and substantive educational blogs are Oculture and Zaid Learn.

In this last post I want to wrap up our OCW reviews series with some comments on MIT OCW - the true point of reference for all other OCW’s. A few months ago I did a post covering the top 15 MIT OCWs. While there are certaintly some good materials on there, such as the intro biology course or aircraft systems engineering, I have to admit that it was a bit tough to find 15 courses that were classifiable as turn-key OCW’s.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of the turn-key OCW to describe a courseware that has all the materials you need to really use it. While lots of universities are doing a great job of making some materials available, few are bundling enough of them together to make it usable. In this respect MIT and Open University are on opposite ends of the spectrum (see my post here). Open University free courses are totally accessible but not comparable to full university courses. MIT courses are full university courses but totally accessible.

As you see below, I’ve give MIT good grades and cause it’s nice to end on a high note. But what I’d really like is to see programs like those of the Open University and MIT continue to make courses that are really usable and deep. I’d like to see these courses taught in virtual classrooms, using open textbooks, with students interacting in forums. Maybe even one day there could be OCW degrees, or some sort of method to demonstrate the work users put into studying.

We’ll see.

Number and Variety of Courses Offered: A-

Course Substance: A-

Material Mix & Accessibility: B+

Overall Score: A-

Jason’s site, Textbook Revolution, was the first and remains the best resource for open textbooks. It continuously contradicts the argument “if it was good, they’d be charging for it.” Staff picks only begin to show some of the materials gathered here…such as the excellent Light and Matter series or Digital History. The best thing I can say about Textbook Revolution is that I use it…when I need a book on statistics or calculus or economics…what have. I come here and search. And 9 times out of 10 there’s something here that helps.

If open educational websites were Super Mario Brothers 2 characters, Learn Out Loud would be Mario. Some of the other options may jump higher or pick up toadstools faster…ok, the analogy is falling apart. But what I’m trying to say is that LOL is just about the best all-around, swiss-army knife of an educational site.

Currently cataloged in the free section are 1911 entries from around the web. Jon and company pick and choose from the best resources around, pointing out the best in their free resource of the day series. They’ve also done a great job of find copyright free materials and recording them in professional studios. Over the past year the podcast selection has expanded tremendously to 16, including the free audiobook of the month podcast.

Poke around. There’s lots here.

Like free education links? Like naked ladies? Then Good Sh#t is the unlikely combination you’re looking for.

Fred is one of the most prolific educational bloggers around, writing dozens of posts per days on everything ranging from history to music to open source software. Although some of the links are hit-or-miss, Good Sh#t points out so many excellent finds that you can easily forgive a couple of so-so’s. To give you an idea, here are a couple links from the past few days.

WORLD`S ANCIENT MYSTERIES: The World`s 10 Most Famous Uncracked Codes

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation.

help to fix your writing

Coral Kingdom Pictures, Coral Photos, Photo Gallery, Picture Gallery, Desktop Wallpaper – National Geographic

the world’s best snowmen & snow art

Raymond Chandler - Raymond Chandler’s Long Goodbye

The Wonderful World of Early Photography.

A complete guide to the Army’s recruiting incentives. - By Phillip Carter and Brad Flora - Slate Magazine

NPR : Songs of the Criminal Life

Just free books

I can’t tell you the number of great links I’ve found through this site. So check it out….although maybe not at work.

Come for the links, stay for the porn. Or do I mean the other way around.

This will be the last week I’ll be writing this blog. Rather than just point out new sites, I thought I’d cover some of my favourites, the best sites I’ve come across over the past few years.

Motion Mountain is by far the best open textbook I’ve come across. It’s so good because it’s not so different from any other textbook. That’s a higher complement than it sounds. Clocking in at almost 1500 pages in this 21st edition, the book could easily substitute any general physics book in a university freshman or advanced high-school course. It’s really fantastic that Christoph Schiller has decided to make this book available for free.

And the openness pays off. The first 360 pages are now in french. And feel free to translate to other languages.

It’s great that people like to use the web to create clever, hyperlinked and multi-media materials. But it’s also important to open-up standard, traditional materials. Congrats to the few trying to do this (credit to R. Preston McAfee for the open IntroEcon textbook as well).

I don’t want to be cynical or discouraging in this series. This recent trend of universities attempting to open information to the world is great.

But as easy as it is to be greatful for any old scraps and raise your Dickensesque soup-bowl upwards with a tentative “Could I have some more, please?”, it’s important to remember that we OER users shouldn’t feel like these universities are doing us a favour. First of all, universities benefit from OER. It’s free press. Second, and more importantly, universities should be all about the open spread of knowledge. Especially public ones.

And that’s why I get a touch annoyed when OCW’s offer slices of a classroom but not the materials necessary to really use them. Learning like this is like trying to drive half-blind looking through beer glasses.

Just like a teacher grades toughly to demand more, we’re doing the same here. We’re grateful for the effort from these universities to make these materials available…but if they’re going to go through all the effort (and press conferences), why not make them useful? Why not make “turn-key” OCWs?

Berklee Shares is another issue. It’s just a blatant attempt to sell their online courses. Really, you guys could do better.

Number and Variety of Courses Offered: C

Course Substance: D

Obviously all the course are going to be music related, and the topics do touch on a variety of instruments, production and management. My real beef is what’s contained in these alleged “OER’s”. Let’s try it out.

I open the site and see “Guitar” on the sidebar. Hey, I play guitar. Let’s see the topics. “Power Chord Progressions in Songwriting“. Hey, I play Power Chords. Let’s open it up.

Oh wait, what’s this screen? Oh, they sell a book. And I can send this to a friend. But where’s the pdf? Oh there it is. I have to hit download. Adobe is giving me a message that there is multi-media content. Rock-on! This is going to have audio and video and all kinds of stuff. I hit ok. I here a little welcome riff. Cool. But wait? It’s only 3 pages. That’s probably because of all the rockin’ multimedia content. Hmm.

Ok, well Page 1 is the introduction. Page 2 has a page of text. And page 3 is full of ads trying to sell me books and their online courses. That’s it? It’s not even a full-sized page…and it refers to content in a part II of the book…where’s part 2? And where is the multimedia? Was it just that lame little intro? Guess so…
True. Some courses are a little longer…we’re talking a full seven or nine pages…well 5-to-7 after cutting out the ads and title pages. But it’s really clear that these are teasers designed to sell product. Worst of all, the Berklee site is disguised as a genuine OCW, complete with Creative Commons licenses. Geez, can’t wait to remix and reuse their ads.

Material Mix & Accessibility: D

For a music school I was expecting some audio. Didn’t find much of that. There are some quicktime files, such even clocking in on over a minute. But really they should do better. If the goal is to sell me their products, they’re not doing a good job.

Overall Score: D

If I was cynical I would saying that Berklee is exploiting the reputation of honest OCW efforts in an effort to draw attention to their “me-too” online learning program and book store. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say this isn’t a cynical marketing attempt. Rather, they probably ran into the issue of “if I make this free, who’s going to pay?” Well, my answer is that if you made it possible for me to really learn, I’d figure it worth my money to let you teach me even more.

Come on. You’re Berklee. You’re like the MIT of music. Act like it.

From Haverford College here’s your hook-up for all the latin and ancient-greek podcasts you could want. Cicero and Ceasar on your iPod, Ovid in your SVU. There are classic textbooks in audio form. And all 100 of you the world over who like the daily news but wish you could hear it in a dead language…you can get that here. Ain’t the internet great?

For more latin and greek nonsense and know-how visit TextKit aka, the mothership.

For all the bitching I do about the lack of authentic “turn-key” Open Coursewares from leading universities, I should give HippoCampus credit in this respect. For instance, choose an area of study such as Algebra and see a choice of topics. Under each topic (eg, Algebra 1), there is a complete list of topics as well as a complete course. The complete course carries you through these topics in an ordered fashion, each point utilisising interactive media, video, answer-prompts and other flash doo-hickeys/doo-dads.

The site is truly aimed at teacher looking to help students reinforce classroom topics at home. And, for better or for worse, the questions are organised around the questions from the classroom textbooks. The bad part of this is there is little room for open textbooks, but I shouldn’t be such a whiny ass…really anyone could jump in and work with these questions. Math is math, right?

In the “homework-helper” vibe, teachers can even create a page where extraneous topics are eliminated and personalised announcements. Perhaps the next step will be the ability to add content…we’ll see.

Like chess? Wish you did? Check out this massive list of chess sites and try every online variety in AJAX, Java and even Google Earth. I’m a fan of the 64squar.es aesthetic but try it out for youself. Most of these sites have some teaching aids or forums, but two other good places to get started are the CC Chess Tactics and WikiChess. By the way, the lady pictured is Carmen Kass, top model and president of the Estonian Chess Association. If you ever needed a reason to start playin…

I’ve just the past two hours playing around with this site. The Met has created art history timelines which allow you to bop about from time and place to see how art developed comparatively and dialectically. The site is really big - once you start on a time period, place, or thematic essay it’s easy to keep linking around through other works and periods.

For instance, start with Easter Island and you’ll link on over to a piece on the moai figures. Then maybe you’ll link out to over of these recommended links. The drop-down menu on the right will also link you to relevant timelines and themes. Students will also appreciate bibliographies.