I just heard of Lecturefox, a site which provides listings of publicly available courses from not only MIT’s Open Courseware, but a number of other schools ranging from UC Berkeley and Kent State to Oxford. It is great to see so much information being made available freely online, I just wish I had a bit more time to actually go through some of the videos. Lecturefox primarily emphasizes courses from scientific fields (it is run by a pair of self-trained German computer scientists), but they also have listings from other fields like economics and philosophy. Some of the offerings are full blown courses with video or audio and lecture notes, while others are recorded lectures from visiting speakers.

I don’t have any sense of the quality of the different offerings–there are certainly some courses I’ve taken in the past which would be extremely boring to watch on video, so it’s not clear to me how useful many of these full lecture series courses would really be. On the other hand, some of the shorter “guest lecture” style talks might be more self contained and accessible.

A few that sounded interesting:

• Human Beings and the Machines of Sunshine – Rice
• Alan Turing: Codebreaker and Pioneer – MIT
• Death – Yale
• The Rise of The Creative Class – George Mason
• Cyber Humor: The End of Humor as We Know it? – Oxford
• Castiglione: The Art of Being a Renaisance Man – Syracuse