Free Study notes and class lectures from leading Universities

‘Computer Applications’ is a vast area. There are great deal of computer reference books and materials available online. It’s not necessary that one has to buy most of the books. In fact, it’s practically impossible to buy all those hefty priced reference books. So, I decided to use Google and lurked around for free information. I was not surprised to find that most of the leading universities offered courseware, lecture slides and pdf documents free.

It was useful for me, so it definitely will be useful for a whole lot of other folks. I’ve collected a list of links to the sites where you get free resource/information:

1) The UC Berkeley University courseware.

The number 1 public school in the US offers podcasts and webcasts of their professors lecturing. There are varieties of subjects offered in here. All the subjects tracked by means of RSS feeds so that you can come to know when there is a new lecture available. There are printable notes and even homework is available on the professor’s homepage. The professor’s homepage is available by means of Google search with the name of the professor.

Here are the links to the pages.

UC Berkeley Webcasts

Google Videos page for UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley RSS Feed

Note: – The UC Berkeley’s webcasts are generally in the Real Player format. Therefore, I would advise you to get either the Real Player or the Media Player Classic for XP or 2000 with the Real Alternative Plug-in.

2) MIT Open Courseware.

One of my favourite geek towns of the world MIT is now offering its notes on an open domain. It contains lectures slides and pdf along with homework and even test papers. Sadly, they do not have video lectures like UCB. I did refer them for my Graph theory papers and the notes were nice. The best part is that you can download the entire lecture as a single zip file. It shall include all the lecture notes and slides.

Here are the links.

MIT Open Courseware Course Listings

MIT Open Courseware Online Textbooks

MIT World Public Videos

MIT Podcast: Zigzag (for all you iPod geeks out there)

A Google search link that gives MIT Courses with Video Lectures

3) Carnegie Mellon’s Open learning initiative.

Carnegie Mellon’s ratings almost reach to the shoulders of that of Berkeley’s. Now the registered mode on this website lets you keep a track of your scores and progress across learning courses. They offer 11 courses and most assisted by powerful and interactive Java applets for practice and testing and a collection of e-books that can be section wise viewed inside your web browser.

Here is the link: – Carnegie Mellon OLI

4) Utah State Open Courseware.

The structure here is quite similar to that of MIT but fairly larger course listing is available here.

Here is the link: – Utah State Course Listings

5) Tufts Open Courseware.

Massachusetts based Tufts University also offers its share of the Open Courseware.

Here is where to find it. Tufts Open Course Listings

6) OpenLearn

OpenLearn is a European initiative. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation support the website. The site contains many courses and a different style of content management. It does look like a large educational e-book library complete with forums for each course and contents.

OpenLearn

7) Connexions

CNX.org developed by Rice University is an open content library of the university’s course materials. The database is newbie friendly and it is easy to find contents. They also have content e-books for higher learning to choose.

Connexions Course List

Home of Connexions

8) University of Washington (Computer Science and Engineering)

Here you will find lectures, class notes and even some videos lectures of Washington University’s CS and Engineering departments.

Here is the link to course and video lectures.

9) Wikiversity

Wiki has always been a very nice source of knowledge. Similarly, Wikiversity is a community that contains detailed guides for all subjects ranging from languages to sciences.

Wikiversity & Wikibooks

10) Archive.org Education.

This site contains archived articles and lectures from various sources. Now there are around 1400 educational resources on this website.

Archive.org Education

I have listed below are some other miscellaneous unsorted links providing resources on various other sources of knowledge. J Have fun exploring them.

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/
http://graduateschool.paristech.org/?langue=EN
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/
http://mitworld.mit.edu/
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/
http://www.law.duke.edu/webcast/index.html
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/multimedia/video_mm.html
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/sci/sls.html#Presentations
http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/multimedia/videoarchive.html
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/webcasts/
http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Default
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/audiovideo.html
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/archive.htm
http://www.oid.ucla.edu/Webcast/
http://www.yale.edu/yale300/democracy/mediatranscripts.htm
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/video.jsp

Keep on adding links if you can find more, leave comments with links to the sources and I’ll update the list.