Showing posts with label Online Courses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online Courses. Show all posts

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Critical Thinking: A Free Course

by Dan Colman, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2019/05/critical-thinking-a-free-course.html
In the playlist above, Gregory Sadler presents a 24-lecture course on "Critical Thinking" - something the world could always use more of. Presented at Fayetteville State University, the course features lectures on topics like Deductive and Inductive Arguments, Fallacies, Rhetorical Devices, Appeals to Authority and much more. The textbook used (and referenced) in the course was Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking. The individual lectures are as follows:
  1. Issues, Claims, Arguments
  2. Arguments and Non-Arguments
  3. Value Judgements 
  4. Deductive and Inductive Arguments with Implicit Premises
  5. Complex Arguments, Unstated Premises
  6. Deductive and Inductive Arguments 1
  7. Deductive and Inductive Arguments 2
  8. Deductive and Inductive Arguments 3
  9. Fallacies of Composition and Division
  10. Information Sources
  11. Experts and Appeal to Authority
  12. Critical Thinking and Advertising
  13. Rhetorical Devices 1
  14. Rhetorical Devices 2
  15. Rhetorical Devices 3
  16. Fallacies 1
  17. Fallacies 2
  18. Fallacies 3
  19. Fallacies 4
  20. Fallacies 5
  21. Fallacies 6
  22. Inductive Arguments 1
  23. Inductive Arguments 2
  24. Inductive Arguments 3
Also find the complete playlist of lectures on YouTube here. Sadler's YouTube channel features other courses and a wealth of philosophy lectures.
"Critical Thinking" has been added to our list of Free Philosophy Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature and Philosophy

by Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/free-courses-in-ancient-history-literature-philosophy

Image by Barcex, via Creative Commons
History & Literature

Philosophy

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Sunday, March 31, 2019

140 Courses Starting at Stanford Continuing Studies Next Week: Explore the Catalogue of Campus and Online Courses

by DC, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/140-courses-starting-at-stanford-continuing-studies-next-week.html
Quick fyi: I spend my days at Stanford Continuing Studies, where we've developed a rich lineup of online courses for lifelong learners, many of which will get started next week. The courses aren't free. But they're first rate, giving adult students--no matter where they live--the chance to work with dedicated teachers and students.
The catalogue includes a large number of online Creative Writing courses, covering the Novel, the Memoir, Creative Nonfiction, Travel Writing, Poetry and more. For the professional, the program offers online business courses in subjects like Entrepreneurship: From Ideas to Funding, An Introduction to Project Management: The Basics for Success and Finding Product/Market Fit: Using Design Research for New Product Success.
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out the larger catalogue. Stanford Continuing Studies has 140 courses getting started this Spring quarter (next week), most taking place in Stanford's classrooms. The two flagship courses of the quarter include: The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci: A 500th Anniversary Celebration and 20th-Century American Literature: An Intellectual Bus Tour with Michael Krasny, the host of KQED’s Forum.
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Sunday, March 10, 2019

A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind: A Free Online Course from Oxford

by Ilia Blinderman, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/a-romp-through-the-philosophy-of-mind-a-free-online-course-from-oxford.html

These days, neuroscience seems to have a monopoly on the mind. Flip to the science section of an established newspaper or magazine, and you’ll likely see the most alluring headlines describing the latest neural findings. So, now that powerful methods of neuroimaging can delve deeper into the structure of the brain than ever before, is there anything that we don’t know about the mind? Well, yes. Apart from stating that it is a manifestation of the brain, science doesn’t offer much to explain what the mind is. In an unfortunate turn for neuroscience, no amount of brain scanning will reveal that, either.
It is at this sort of juncture that science passes the baton to philosophy. Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought you two introductory philosophy courses (Critical Reasoning for Beginners and A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners) by Oxford University’s Marianne Talbot.
Today, we bring you another of Talbot’s excellent philosophical primers: A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind. The five-part lecture series begins with a discussion of René Descartes’ dualism, which comprises the idea that the mind is non-physical and is therefore distinct from the body. The course then moves through an exposition of Identity Theory, according to which all of our mental states are merely manifestations of an analogous set of brain processes. Once Talbot outlines the drawbacks to each of these theories, she explains the views of several other phenomenological camps, including the epiphenomenalists, who see mental states as real but not physical, and  eliminativists, who do not think that mental states are real at all. She then promptly proceeds to upend these conceptions of the mind. As with all of Talbot’s previous courses, this one is highly recommended.
A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind is currently available on the University of Oxford website in both audio and video formats, and also on iTunesU (see the lectures above). You can find it listed in our collection of Free Online Philosophy Courses, alongside classes like Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Mind & Cognition, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. They're all part of our collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.
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Wednesday, November 21, 2018

E-learning Academic Success

by Educational Research Techniques:  https://educationalresearchtechniques.com/2018/11/21/elearning-academic-success/


Studying online has become almost an expectation now. Even if you never earn a degree or take a class for credit online there are still many opportunities to train and develop skills over the internet. The role of the teacher is to try and find ways to engage and support their students as they begin their learning experience physically alone with support perhaps thousands of miles away.


In this post, we will look at ways to encourage the academic success of students while studying online. Two ways to support academic success in elearning involve providing feedback and encouraging engagement.


Provide Feedback


Feedback is critical in every aspect of teaching. However, in elearning, it is even more important. This is because the students have no face-to-face communication with you so they have no idea how they are doing beyond a letter grade. In addition, there is no body language to examined or other paralinguistic features that the student can infer meaning from.


Giving feedback requires timeliness. In other words, mark assignments quickly and indicate progress. In addition, if students do not meet expectations it is critical that you point them towards resources that will help them to inderstand. For example, students seem to neglect reading rubrics. When a student gets feedback from a rubric they can see where they were not successful.


In terms of a more formative feedback approach, there may be times where it is beneficial to live stream lecture. This allows the students to chime in whenever they do not understand an idea or point. Furthermore, the teacher can ask a question or two of the students and get feedback from them.


Engage Them


Engaging is almost synonymous with active. In other words, students should be doing something in order to learn. Unfortunately, listening is a passive activity which implies that lecturing is not the best way to inspire learning.


In the contest of elearning, one of the ways to inspire active learning is to have the students go out and do something in the real world and report what happens online in the form of a reflection. For example, students studying English will go out and teach English in the real world. They will then come and share their experience. The teacher is then able to provide insights and feedback to improve the students teaching. This provides a connection to the real world as well as a sense of relevance.


In a more abstract subject, such as history, music theory, or engineering, students can become active through sharing these insights with laymen or explaining how they are already applying this information at their job or in the home. The goal of using provides the purpose for learning the content.


Conclusion


Feedback and engagement are critical to success in a situation in which the student is primarily learning alone which is found in the context of elearning.

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Saturday, October 13, 2018

Download Free Courses from Famous Philosophers: From Bertrand Russell to Michel Foucault

You can download hundreds of Free Courses from Great Universities (perhaps you already knew that). And that includes courses by some of the biggest minds teaching in philosophy (is that old news too? Or some welcome good news?). So we're starting the week by giving you a rundown of some notable mentions.
John Searle began teaching philosophy at UC-Berkeley in 1959, and first did important work on “speech act” theory. Later he turned to consciousness and artificial intelligence, out of which came his famous “Chinese room” thought experiment. You can find a nice trio of classes online.
  • Philosophy of Language - iTunes
  • Philosophy of Mind - iTunes
  • Philosophy of Society - iTunes
Walter Kaufmann spent 33 years teaching philosophy at Princeton. And more than anyone else, Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to the English-speaking world and made it possible to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker. Here he delivers three lectures on existentialists.
  • Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre - Web Site
Leo Strauss landed at The University of Chicago in 1949, where he spent decades teaching and writing on political philosophy, especially the political thought of the Ancients. His intellectual legacy is controversial, but his courses valuable.
Find many more Strauss courses here.
Bertrand Russell was one of the most important British philosophers of the last century - a logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. When it comes to this lecture series, start with the bottom lecture first and then work your way up.
  • Authority & the Individual: Six BBC Lectures - Web Site
Michel Foucault taught history and philosophy at the Collège de France and published influential writings on power, knowledge, and discourse.
  • Six Lectures on Truth & Subjectivity presented on the UC Berkeley campus (English) - YouTube
Find more Foucault audio here and here.
Hubert Dreyfus has taught many popular existentialism and phenomenology courses also at UC Berkeley, some of which laid the foundation for his new book, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.
  • Existentialism in Literature & Film - iTunes
  • Heidegger - iTunes
  • Heidegger’s Being & Time - iTunes
Michael Sandel has taught political philosophy at Harvard since 1980. His course on justice (below) has been taken by more than 15,000 students, making it the most popular undergraduate course at Harvard. This version aired on PBS and the web.
For all 75 philosophy courses, please see the Philosophy section of our list of 575 Free Online Courses.
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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke and More

by , Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/105-animated-philosophy-videos-from-wireless-philosophy.html



You may remember that we featured Wireless Philosophy, an open access philosophy project created by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got started. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keeping in with its mission of producing free, informative and entertaining animated videos meant to introduce a host of philosophical issues.

Our own Josh Jones called it “a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions” in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Question coastline than ever before. There are currently 105 Wiphi videos in total.



At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cognitive biases, which add up to a surprisingly thorough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our thinking askew, from the “alief” (an automatic or habitual mental attitude, as opposed to a deliberate belief) to reference dependence and loss aversion to what we might perhaps describe as a meta-bias amusingly called the GI Joe fallacy (the tendency for our biases to stick around even when we should know better).

Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as examined by Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.



Both of those playlists do come with a certain practicality, at least by philosophical standards: who, after all doesn’t want to think more correctly (or at least less incorrectly), and who doesn’t want to live the good life (or at least a better life than they live now)? But the harder core of casual philosophy enthusiasts - always a demanding group - should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or historical philosophical topics, such as the seven-part playlist on classical theism above.

Dig deeper into their Youtube channel and you’ll find more simple but not simplistic lessons on the philosophy of mathematics, language, ancient China, and much more.

The list of university stakeholders in Wireless Philosophy nowadays includes, we should note, Duke, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and U. Toronto, in addition to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from other universities have contributed to the video collection. 

For example, Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans) created the videos on Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Also find complete courses taught by Surprenant on our list of Free Online Philosophy Courses, a subset of our list, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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