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List of Free Lectures Online Whether your goal is to earn a promotion, graduate at the top of your class, or just accelerate your life. Lectures can help get you there. Our archives of lectures cover a huge range of topics and have all been handpicked and carefully designed by experienced instructors throughout the world who are dedicated to helping you take the next step toward meeting your career goals. With OnlineCourses.com's engaging collection of lectures, your free time will turn into self-improvement time.

The United Nations University formally joined the OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium on 24 May 2006 and became a member of the Japan OCW Consortium on 26 March 2008. The UN University is committed to the development of this OCW website that showcases the training and educational programmes implemented by the University in a wide range of areas relevant to the work of the United Nations.

Website with a good blog with strategies for teachers to make learning fun and for teaching creative and critical thinking skills. "While that is still an important piece, it has blossomed into so much more. At this point, about 3/4 of the posts here are written by guest bloggers in the field of education. This has resulted in Minds in Bloom becoming an amazing resource for teachers, tutors, and homeschoolers, as well as counselors, and other professionals who work with children. In addition to posts about teaching strategies and classroom management, you will also find plenty of freebies and an occasional giveaway."

I have found a number of interesting and useful articles on the blog at Minds in Bloom. In particular, the guest posts by occupational therapist Loren Shlaes offer ideas about things I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. How children sit, affects their brains and abilities to focus. Asking kids to sit still harms, rather than helps learning!

In this article, Justin Reich, a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that LMS are "homogenized, transient and disempowering" and that they serve "the needs of institutions, not individual students." The author describes teaching a course in a large-scale environment where "the specific goal is for students to learn to build networks of learning resources- people, readings, websites and communities- that can help them continue learning in a domain long after a course ends." His course, built on Connectivist principles, asks students to move beyond the course LMS and "curate links and connections and share their evolving ideas." Students used websites, blogs, Twitter and other Web spaces to share and store their ideas. The author discusses several advantages of moving beyond the LMS. Justin, R. (2015, February 13). Techniques for Unleashing Student Work from Learning Management Systems. Retrieved February 27, 2015, from http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/02/techniques-for-unleashing-student-work-from-learning-management-systems/

The study concluded that for online classes that range from 16 to 40 students, increasing class size as much as 25 percent does not significantly affect student grades, credits earned in the next session, or enrollment in the next session. The preliminary paper discussed the implications for the results, suggesting impact on cost savings for institutions with an online program with large numbers of students and classes. For instance, establishing class size limits of 40 students as opposed to 30 students could have positive financial implications through instructor compensation.  The researchers acknowledged limitations of the study, which was the sample of relatively small online classes.

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative: - planning of education projects linked with the development of free content. - development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning. - work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs. - networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

TED-Ed's commitment to creating lessons worth sharing is an extension of TED's mission of spreading great ideas. Within the growing TED-Ed video library, you will find carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform.

The Learning Circle: Classroom Activities on First Nations in Canada, Ages 8 to 11 Researched and written by Harvey McCue and Associates for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, from 2006. Special thanks to: The First Nations Confederacy of Cultural Education Centres The National Association of Friendship Centres

This is a learning research from the Ministry of Northern and Indigenous Affairs (from 2006). It has learning and lesson activities related to topics relevant to First Nations in Canada today. The activities will not apply to all First Nations and should be adapted to appropriately reflect the knowledge and cultures of the local First Nations where you live and work. I like that this resource encourages a focus on contemporary First Nations communities and reserves. It also has a section on First Nations heroes and a section on critically examining stereotypes in media about First Nations people.

Simon, J., Burton, K., Lockhart, E., & O'Donnell, S. (2014). Post-secondary distance education in a contemporary colonial context: Experiences of students in a rural First Nation in Canada. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 15(1). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1357/2770

This paper argues that first time eLearners often experience cognitive overload, (as described in Cognitive Load Theory), in the early stages of an online course and it is suggested that this is a likely contributor to high drop out rates, particularly in terms of those withdrawing within the first few weeks of the course start

Scoop.it allows you to bring together topics of interest in one location, for easy access. This Scoop.it site, curated by a Miss Noor, contains hundreds of scooped websites relating to Web 2.0. The focus is the best resources and tools of web 2.0 in the classroom. You could spend hours exploring the different links and feel like you have just touched the surface.

Re: "Online learning shaking up the world of education," Jan. 30. Monday I started a MOOC (massive open online course) at the University of Edinburgh, "An Introduction to Philosophy." Eighty thousand students are enrolled. My email inbox is crammed with hundreds of introductory personal statements covering what meals students just ate, major obsessions, relationships, etc.

For those interested in Aboriginal Postsec. Education. Preston, J. P. (2008). The Urgency of Postsecondary Education for Aboriginal Peoples. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 2008(86), 1-22.

I just found this nice little collection of resources while looking for project ideas. The site is Canadian and has resources for grades K-12. The subjects are also broken down into science, english, social studies and math (and it's further broken down within each of these). There are a number of activities and lesson plans available for teachers and the topics covered are all very current and I'm sure they would engage today's student. One of the especially nice things on this site is that they also have resources for parents and students. I think this is key, as so much learning takes place outside of the classroom.

Free and stable. A very robust and secure online discussion platforms. Easy to use and moderate. Easy to set up and begin. Discussions, polls, debates. Allows attachment of pictures, videos, PDF, Microsoft documents. Reports and results; grouping of students...

A good tool to add to your Non-LMS toolkit

For those of us who are unsure of the benefits of blogging, here are some good reasons. Another good article on the same website is "The Internet and the Future of Education."

What is interesting is the collateral damage of those seated nearby being diverted by activity happening on someone else's screen. Wonder if that works the other way--in that if there is a strong focus on the lecture/class with well-organized notes being taken, does that behaviour/visual reinforce the behaviour of those sitting nearby....

Sometimes forgotten, for it is certainly not new or "sexy", yet a powerful quizzing tool to add to your collection of non-LMS Web 2.0 resources. Very, very robust. Allows you to manage classes, quizzes, and reports. Easy to use. Stable (I first started to use it over a decade ago). Once you create an account, you will see the tabs across the top of the page for instructors.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.