If you’re looking to educate yourself at home during the Coronavirus crisis, check out MIT’s OpenCourseWare program. There is no registration, fees, tests, or homework.
You can view lectures and download class materials just by going to: OCW website.
Then click on Explore to find a course of interest to you. You do not need to register, pay fees, or complete homework unless you want to.
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors.
More than 2,400 courses are available online at OCW. While a few of these were limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also included interactive web demonstrations, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures.
Many courses include complete video lectures. Here are some popular examples.
The Film Experience
The Film Experience is an online course that concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers and westerns, and European and Japanese art cinema. It explores the work of Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Capra, Hawks, Hitchcock, Altman, Renoir, DeSica, and Kurosawa. Through comparative reading of films from different eras and countries, students develop the skills to turn their in-depth analyses into interpretations and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship.
The professor for this course is Prof. David Thorburn. Here is Lecture 9: Alfred Hitchcock, posted on Youtube. For more information and a list of other video lectures visit The Film Experience at MIT
How to Speak
Patrick Winston’s How to Speak seminar has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), usually to overflow crowds, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules. Professor Winston’s collection of rules is presented along with examples of their application in job-interview talks, thesis defenses, oral examinations, and lectures.
Here’s his final lecture, posted on Youtube.
If you want to know more about this series, visit the How To Speak page at MIT.
BlockChain and Money
This course is for students wishing to explore blockchain technology’s potential use—by entrepreneurs and incumbents—to change the world of money and finance. The course begins with a review of Bitcoin and an understanding of the commercial, technical, and public policy fundamentals of blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. The class then continues on to current and potential blockchain applications in the financial sector.
Here’s the first lecture, posted on Youtube:
To learn more visit Blockchain and Money at MIT
Speaking and Cooking Italian
Speak Italian With Your Mouth Full is an MIT online seminar where you will dive into learning basic conversational Italian, Italian culture, and the Mediterranean diet. Each class is based on the preparation of a delicious dish and on the bite-sized acquisition of parts of the Italian language and culture. A good diet is not based on recipes only, it is also rooted in healthy habits and in culture. At the end of the seminar the participants will be able to cook some healthy and tasty recipes and to understand and speak basic Italian.
Here’s the first lecture, posted on Youtube:
To learn more visit Speak Italian With Your Mouth Full
About MIT OpenCourseWare (from Wikipedia)
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced in 2001 and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.
As of May 2018, over 2,400 courses were available online. While a few of these were limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also included interactive web demonstrations in Java, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures.
As of May 2018, 100 courses included complete video lectures. The videos were available in streaming mode, but could also be downloaded for viewing offline. All video and audio files were also available from YouTube, iTunes U and the Internet Archive.
