Get a free college education, on the Web

Today I’d like to talk about something non-political and wonderful: the growing selection of free college courses now available as MP3s for Web download.

For years, I’ve been a fanatic Teaching Company customer. Their college courses are simply masterful. I’m finally getting the education I didn’t get in college: the philosophy, comparative religion, literature, linguistics, medieval and ancient history, intellectual history, archaeology... all the stuff I didn’t appreciate as a kid, but find utterly compelling now.

I have shelves full of their stuff. I could not possibly recommend any company’s products more highly. And now that they’re publishing newer courses in MP3 download format, their content is even more convenient. (And, since they’re waiving their steep shipping & handling charges for downloads, it’s an even better deal, too.)

But, as with everywhere else, the Web’s giving them some serious free competition. And it’s coming straight from the sources: the universities where the Teaching Company finds its professors.

The best I’ve found so far:

The University of California, Berkeley (flat out wonderful stuff).

MIT’s Open CourseWare program (which offers materials for dozens of courses, but audio downloads for only a relative few).

Purdue (dozens of courses, a bit inconsistent in both audio quality and content, and some of it locked down by password. But, even so, plenty of excellent stuff that’s currently free for download -- though check the copyright statement).

There’s even one lonely course from Harvard: an introduction to computers and the Internet for non-majors.

There are some disadvantages, for those of us who are spoiled by Teaching Company’s wares.

First, you have to wade through all the extraneous content about what’ll be on the midterm, what the prof’s office hours are, who the T.A.s are, etc., etc. Skip lightly through the first lecture and you’ll lose much of that.

Second, the Teaching Company’s content is neatly structured into bite-sized 30-minute lectures. The “real” college courses are the classic 50 minutes, 1:15 minutes, sometimes longer. That’s a hassle when you’re listening on an MP3 player that can’t set bookmarks. If I ever get some time and the right software, I may just chop ’em up myself.

Third, if you get really involved in a course that’s being given during the current semester, of course you have to wait for the new lectures to actually be delivered. (That’s where I am right now with Thomas Laqueur’s terrific UC Berkeley course, History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present. It’s already Sunday 2/12, and they haven’t posted Thursday’s podcast yet. Come on guys, I’m panting in anticipation!)

Fourth, some of these courses are only available in streaming video or audio formats. The clumsy solution: buy an $11.95 copy of Total Recorder and set it up to capture the streams, one at a time. Do it in the background while you’re working on something else. Or use a spare computer if you have one. It’s slow, but it works.

Fifth, occasionally you’ll have to worry about hassles like file naming and ID3 tagging, though the university podcasters seem to be improving about this.

But all these complaints are mere trivia when you consider how much incredible audio content is now available free. Let me make a few recommendations to start you out...

You’ll have to capture streams, and you’ll miss out on his wonderful visuals, but don’t miss Berkeley’s Fall 2005 course library for Alex Filippenko’s amazing Astro C10 / LS C70U Introduction to General Astronomy.

Also available primarily as streams, Berkeley’s US Foreign Policy After 9/11, which relies heavily on guest lecturers including some of the world’s most impressive foreign policy experts. (Incidentally, course coordinator Harry Kreisler has hosted a long-standing interview series at Berkeley, and he’s archived many of the most relevant interviews here.)

Biology’s been turned upside down in the past couple of decades: if your understanding of the subject is out of date, we highly recommend MIT’s introductory bio course. You may also like Roy Caldwell’s Animal Behavior at Berkeley. (That’s the behavior of animals, taught at Berkeley. Not the animal behavior of some of those who attend or live around Berkeley!)

If you haven’t studied psych in awhile, MIT’s Introduction to Psychology, Fall 2004 is a must-listen. Further into the social sciences, we’ve learned a lot from Steven Hillis’ Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems at Purdue. (Hillis may strike you as surprisingly conservative, especially if you’ve been fooled into thinking that academia is a vast undifferentiated blob of left-winginess.)

Like most content providers faced with the Internet, colleges will struggle to figure out their “business models” for posting free content. Most are still shying away: perhaps they think we won’t attend if we can get it for free. You can’t blame them, and it’s hard to know how this will play out.

But, all in all, I suspect that today’s resources will be just the tip of the iceberg. In a couple of years, there might be more audio and video course content available on the Web than even the most fanatic student can use. Even me.