eLearning

Interested in history? Fascinated with physics? Want to get a Harvard (or Berkeley or Yale) education without leaving the Island? Or, do you want to know how to build a mini hovercraft? eLearning opens up these opportunities to anyone with the time and a computer with internet access.

Recently, Bill Hogan of the AARP Bulletin posted an article about eLearning, or Lifelong Learning, called How to Learn Just About Anything Online – for Free.

According to Wikipedia:

E-learning is essentially the computer and network-enabled transfer of skills and knowledge. E-learning applications and processes include Web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classroom opportunities and digital collaboration. Content is delivered via the Internet, intranet/extranet, audio or video tape, satellite TV, and CD-ROM. It can be self-paced or instructor-led and includes media in the form of text, image, animation, streaming video and audio.

Below are listed ten interesting web sites dedicated to lifelong learning.

For more eLearning opportunities, check out Hogan's article on the AARP web site.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. Academic Earth is a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world's leading scholars.

Forum Network

The Forum Network is a PBS and NPR public media service in collaboration with public stations and community partners across the United States. Through an expanding network of local public stations producing content with their community partners, The Forum Network brings a diverse range of perspectives on both local and global issues to audiences around the world, and contains an online library featuring thousands of lectures by some of the world's foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers, and community leaders, available to citizens of the world for free.

Howcast

Howcast empowers people with engaging, useful how-to information wherever, whenever they need to know how. Howcast streams tens of millions of videos every month across its multi-platform distribution network.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is a free web-based publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it is open and available to the world and is a permanent activity of MIT. The Massachusett Institute of Technology cautions: OCW is not an MIT education; OCW does not grant degrees or certificates; OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty; Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

Open Culture

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It's all free. It's all enriching. But it's also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Open Culture's whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

TED.com

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out, in 1984 , as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. TED.com makes the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 700 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week.

VideoLectures.NET

VideoLectures.NET is a free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to the scientific community but also to the general public.

webcast.berkeley

Every semester, UC Berkeley webcasts select courses and events for on-demand viewing via the Internet. webcast.berkeley course lectures are provided as a study resource for students and are not sanctioned as a substitute for going to the course lectures.

WonderHowTo

WonderHowTo.com is a community-fueled, search engine and directory for Free How-To Video. It provides the largest, most contemporary, and most diverse resource in this increasingly vibrant space.

YouTube EDU

YouTube EDU centralizes the content from over 100 universities and colleges. This robust collection gives you access to lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders, new research and campus tours. With YouTube EDU you can access over 200 full courses from leading universities, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Yale.