Topics: Assorted
Explanation Quality: Best
Medium: Text, Practice Exercises
Type of Content: Teaching Material
Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is part of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It offers free online courses that anyone can take. While there are only 18 at the moment, they still cover a variety of topics.
There are a couple of things about OLI that I really like. One is simply the style of the courses. They are written in a very accessible way. They are all self-paced. It starts out with a syllabus, and then a brief section with suggestions on how to most effectively use the online course.
The course is mainly composed of written explanations, sort of like those you would find in a textbook. At the beginning of each section is a description of what you will learn in that section. There are little exercises you can do to see if you understand the material (that's the "Did I Get This?" box in the picture). Most of the courses are introductory level, designed to be taken if you have little or no prior experience (or if you haven't thought about the subject in a long, long time).
I have personally been working my way through the Statistics course and the American English speech class. Although I'm only taking the Speech class for fun (technically I'm taking them both for fun, but I do seriously want to learn statistics, I just haven't been able to take a real class at school yet), I find it pretty interesting. To help show the correct way to pronounce things it offers audio files to listen to and diagrams to illustrate what is happening with your mouth and throat. The statistics class is more like a typical math class, with explanations and problems.
This is not a good website if you only need to look up a quick explanation for your chemistry homework. It is a good website if you want to seriously learn about a subject, if you are taking a class in it but your teacher is really bad at explaining so you want another resource you can use simultaneously, or if you found a new subject you think is interesting but you don't even know what you don't know and so have no idea where to start. If any of those sound like you (or even if they don't) it is worth checking out.
Explanation Quality: Best
Medium: Text, Practice Exercises
Type of Content: Teaching Material
Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is part of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It offers free online courses that anyone can take. While there are only 18 at the moment, they still cover a variety of topics.
The course is mainly composed of written explanations, sort of like those you would find in a textbook. At the beginning of each section is a description of what you will learn in that section. There are little exercises you can do to see if you understand the material (that's the "Did I Get This?" box in the picture). Most of the courses are introductory level, designed to be taken if you have little or no prior experience (or if you haven't thought about the subject in a long, long time).
I have personally been working my way through the Statistics course and the American English speech class. Although I'm only taking the Speech class for fun (technically I'm taking them both for fun, but I do seriously want to learn statistics, I just haven't been able to take a real class at school yet), I find it pretty interesting. To help show the correct way to pronounce things it offers audio files to listen to and diagrams to illustrate what is happening with your mouth and throat. The statistics class is more like a typical math class, with explanations and problems.
This is not a good website if you only need to look up a quick explanation for your chemistry homework. It is a good website if you want to seriously learn about a subject, if you are taking a class in it but your teacher is really bad at explaining so you want another resource you can use simultaneously, or if you found a new subject you think is interesting but you don't even know what you don't know and so have no idea where to start. If any of those sound like you (or even if they don't) it is worth checking out.
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