Giveaway Of The Day

One for the cash-strapped FE sector methinks...

Adit Testdesk is an ad hoc suite of tools that enables you to build tests, run them and analyze test results. Using its robust library with over 10 question types, you can create a test of any complexity level.

You've got 19 hours (at time of posting) to download this.

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

Note: No mention of Inverness CT & Celtic's Giveaway Of The Day yesterday...

A Christmas Message from The Phantom Engineer...

...and performed by the casts of Peanuts & Scrubs.

Open Learning. Is Yale the key?

Yet another prestigious American university puts course material online...

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

Courses available at the launch are:

• Introduction to Psychology
• Introduction to Political Philosophy
• Frontiers & Controversies in Astrophysics
• Modern Poetry
• Death
• Fundamentals of Physics
• Introduction to the Old Testament

Really good stuff (on brief acquaintance) - videos of individual lectures with transcripts, notes & audio files (mp3), all freely downloadable. One word of warning - these are complete courses which can consist of 20+ lectures plus, heavens above, required reading. Still, a useful addition to the canon. Remember learning for learnings sake?

http://open.yale.edu/

This post is also available as a podcast (aRKive-02-30-35) at http://www.spokentext.net/recordings/arkive

Source: Open Culture

The Western Tradition plus

More free stuff. (I'd like to think that some of the sites / materials suggested here might be of some use in FE. This one's probably stretching the elastic naivety (nativity, anyone?) to breaking point). Anyway...

The Western Tradition is a video instructional series on Western civilization for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 52 half-hour video programs.
Covering the ancient world through the age of technology, this illustrated lecture by Eugen Weber presents a tapestry of political and social events woven with many strands — religion, industry, agriculture, demography, government, economics, and art. A visual feast of over 2,700 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art portrays key events that shaped the development of Western thought, culture, and tradition. This series is also valuable for teachers seeking to review the subject matter.

It's nearly 20 years old now but still good stuff. Now, a bottle of 20-year-old, that's the real good stuff!

http://www.learner.org/resources/series58.html

It might be useful to check out the complete list of learner resources (free but requires registration here).

Source: Open Culture

New stuff from MIT...and it's free too!

For six years, MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative has done a great job bringing free educational materials to adult learners worldwide.

Now, it has launched a section of its website devoted to high school students and teachers. Here, you’ll find a series of “MIT introductory courses” within 11 major areas of study (e.g. Engineering, Foreign Languages, Math, etc.).

This is a trove of material that the ambitious student (or teacher) will certainly want to explore.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/home/home/index.htm

Source: Open Culture (shamelessly cut 'n' pasted - sorry guys!)