Education Links

Free educational videos, lectures, podcasts, notes, courses, etc

The aim of this section is to provide pointers to a wide range of free, on-line, self-study or home-study material

Broadcasters

High production values and a wide demographic target make much of this, made for television/radio, material almost effortless

• The BBC iPlayer list of factual programs Recently aired programs can be re-played on-line in the UK^†
• BBC Radio factual programs^†
• BBC Radio podcasts^†
• SBS Documentaries (Australian TV)
• PBS Nova (American TV)
• PBS Science & Nature
• National Geographic Video Player
• TVO podcasts

Starter

Introductory level information much of which is aimed at children

• Planet Science provides inspiration for young children interested in science
• The Royal Institution has an on-line archive of science 'Christmas Lectures' for children (shown on British television) going back to 1962
• The BBC Bitesize resources to help children revise for GCSE exams (Age 16)
• howstuffworks don't wonder - find out
• Educational materials on the NASA web site including videos, lectures, podcasts and an image library that's out of this world
• TED-Ed YouTube Channel: Short lessons illustrated with animation and demonstrations
• ESA has multilingual educational material both on-line and in books/cd-roms.
• Open Educational Resources
• Periodic Videos have produced short videos about each of the chemical elements
• Over 2000 high-school & college level video tutorials from the Khan Academy
• Over 7000 middle school to college level educational resources from HippoCampus

• NATGEO@HOME Quizzes, videos, science experiments, and at-home classroom resources from National Geographic
• PBS Kids Curriculum-based entertainment
• BBC Teach thousands of free curriculum-mapped videos, arranged by age-group and subject
• Thousands of kids activities at Khan Academy Kids (2-7)
• Nearly 10,000 free video lessons, resources and activities at the Oak National Academy (4-16)
• Radiolab The- kid-friendly episodes
• Club SciKidz Sciency activities for youngsters (3-15)
• The Artful Parent Arty projects for youngsters

Intermediate

Free Online Courses (with assignments etc)

• Alison over 600 free practical certified literacy and diploma courses
• Udamy with over 1500 'real world' courses

Advanced

'Leading edge' information most of which is university level and most of which is presented by the people making the discoveries.

• Many universities have contributed individual lectures and full courses to Archive.org
• Teaching Resources from CERN
• Post-secondary education on the NASA web site
• ESA has multilingual educational material both on-line and in books/cd-roms. It has also made available Technical Documents and Data Sets
• Videos of many Royal Society events
• VideoLectures.NET videos of conferences, summer schools, workshops etc. Often with downloadable accompanying notes.
• The Steeple archive of higher education podcasts from Cambridge, Oxford and the Open University
• Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT
• Videos of significant public events at MIT including many lectures
• Post-secondary links at the Open Educational Resources web site
• Links to free online courses from top universities from OpenCulture
• openLearn Free learning resources from The Open University
• Academi Earth has thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars
• Links to free courses, textbooks and course materials
• Video Lectures given at the TED conference
• Scitable free science library and personal learning tool from Nature Publishing Group
• Reith Lectures are transmitted annually by the BBC and were started to advance public understanding of significant issues of the day through high-profile speakers. Many of these can also be downloaded as MP3's

• YouTube Channels

  • University of California, Berkeley
  • UNSW
  • MIT (for OpenCourseWare)
  • NPTEL
  • The Open University
  • Research Channel
  • Singularity University
  • Smithsonian
  • Stanford University
  • Yale University
• MIT Videos Over 12,000 vidoes in over 150 Channels

• Free Online Courses (with assessed assignments etc)

  • Udacity
  • edX
  • OpenCourseWare hundreds of higher education institutions providing free courses
  • Futurelearn is a spin off of the Open University, bringing together a couple of dozen partners (mostly British Universities) to provide free online courses
  • Saylor Academy
  • open2study

Computing

• The Computer & Technology films at Archive.org
• The Computer & Technology audio recordings (Radio Programs, lectures, conferences, etc) at Archive.org
• Computing lectures at Archive.org
• Computing Education Links at the Open Educational Resources web site
• Computer Science lectures at Academi Earth
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT
• DIY Computer Science Free, Self Paced, Online Courses
• From NAND to Tetris is a free open source course taking students from NAND gates through processor design through to running operating systems and games on their earlier hardware design.
• codecademy Teach yourself programming online.
• Much of the first 50 years (1951-2000) of the ACM's digital library is available for free. This includes many foundational articles in computing.

Repositories

• The Moving Image Archive at Archive.org allows many educational films to be downloaded
• Over a million e-texts at Archive.org
• BBC archive sorted by theme
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• The Open Science Directory is a huge directory of online technical journals many of which can be accessed for free
• The Encyclopedia of Life bring together over a million pages information on the may forms of life on Earth

• The Royal Society

  Access to their online archive is now free and, for some journals, goes back almost 350 years

  • Philosophical Transactions B (Biological Sciences)
  • Proceedings B (flagship biological research journal)
  • Biology Letters (Short, highly-innovative, cutting-edge research articles and opinion pieces)
  • Open Biology (Biology at the molecular and cellular level)
  • Philosophical Transactions A (Devoted to a specific area of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences)
  • Proceedings A (Research articles across the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences)
  • Interface (Cross-disciplinary research at the interface between the physical and life sciences)
  • Interface Focus (Themed issues covering cross-disciplinary research at the interface between the physical and life sciences)
  • Notes and Records (Original research in the history of science, technology and medicine)
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America issues older than 6 months are free on-line
• Public Library of Science is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
• Open access to over half a million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
• 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents at the the Internet Archive
• Over 28 million free scholarly articles
• National (USA) Academies Press books can be downloaded for free
• Global Text Project open content electronic textbooks
• Wikibooks the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit

• Medical and Life Sciences

  • MEDLINE allows you to search the abstracts of medical journals
  • PMC (PubMed Central) free full-text archive of over 2 million peer-reviewed articles in biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. Also available PMC Canada and Europe PMC which allows the searching of 25 million abstracts.
  • Wellcome Trust's Library is mostly medical related. Extra services are available after free registration

Misc

• Wikipedia in an ever growing Open Source encyclopedia
• Search the text in books from Google
• Search scholarly literature from Google
• Video Search from Google (include words like: Documentary, Science, Lecture, Computing, etc)
• Bad Science how and where good science is turned bad.
• OpenStudy forum for asking study questions or giving answers. Looks like lots of homework's getting done here.
• Zooniverse learn about and do research for Citizen Science projects

Free Books

• Project Gutenburg
• The English Server
• WWW Virtual Library
• The Internet Public Library
• Downloadable texts from The Internet Archive
• World eBook Library
• University of Virginia Libraries Electronic Text Center
• University of Pennsylvania's listing of over 25,000 free e-books
• Open access to over 350,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology
• The Internet Classics Archive
• Open Library has a catalogue of over 1,000,000 free ebooks
• WorldCat searches the collections of more than 10,000 libraries