MIT Level Introductory Physics Free Online Course

Prof. Pritchard’s education group, RELATE, has developed a highly successful problem-solving pedagogy and an online learning environment where instruction, assessment, and interactions with other students are blended together and where students control their instructional path. RELATE education group at MIT is offering a free online course in Mechanics called Mechanics Online. The course places greater emphasis on solving challenging problems involving several concepts at once.

Registration for the course is open until the course starts on March 1st 2012.

Register for Mechanics Online here.

Free course on developing iPad applications from CMU's HCI institute

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is offering free lectures on 'Developing iPad Applications' on iTunes U — bringing the top-notch instruction of CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) to learners far and wide.




The course is co-taught by CMU Assistant Professor Niki Kittur and a team of top industry developers, this project-based course will focus on the design and implementation of iPad applications that help users visualize and make sense of large data sets.

Bridging theory and practice, the course will give students:

• a basic background in visualization;
• understanding of the cognitive processes involved in transforming visual representations into mental representations, insight and discovery; and
• instruction on implementing these techniques in real applications for the iPad.

The software engineering topics taught will focus on the latest technologies available in the newly released iOS 5.

For those interested in following along, object-oriented programming experience is recommended.

Watch the course on iTunes U or on any iOS device with the free iTunes U app.

More free online courses from Stanford University

In addition to the previously posted free online courses from Stanford, the under-listed courses are also available:

• Anatomy
• Making Green Buildings
• Information Theory
• Computer Science 101
• Machine Learning
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Natural Language Processing
• Game Theory
• Cryptography

Do yourself some good and register to learn some new things in 2012. It's free, so you've really got nothing to lose, right?

Free Online course from Stanford University on Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

Tim Roughgarden, Associate Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Management Science and Enginering at Stanford University will be taking a course in Design and Analysis of Algorithms in January 2012.

In the course you will learn several fundamental principles of algorithm design. You'll learn the divide-and-conquer design paradigm, with applications to fast sorting, searching, and multiplication. You'll learn several blazingly fast primitives for computing on graphs, such as how to compute connectivity information and shortest paths. Finally, we'll study how allowing the computer to "flip coins" can lead to elegant and practical algorithms and data structures. Learn the answers to questions such as: How do data structures like heaps, hash tables, bloom filters, and balanced search trees actually work, anyway? How come QuickSort runs so fast? What can graph algorithms tell us about the structure of the Web and social networks? Did my 3rd-grade teacher explain only a suboptimal algorithm for multiplying two numbers?

Prerequisites: How to program in at least one programming language (like C, Java, or Python); familiarity with proofs, including proofs by induction and by contradiction; and some discrete probability, like how to compute the probability that a poker hand is a full house. At Stanford, a version of this course is taken by sophomore, junior, and senior-level computer science majors.

You can learn more or register for the course here.

Free Online Course on Software As A Service (Saas) from Stanford University

Armando Fox, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and  current Director of the Parallel Computing Lab will be taking a course on Software Engineering for Software as a Service in February 2012.

The course will teach the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails. Agile developers continuously refine and refactor a working but incomplete prototype until the customer is happy with result, with the customer offering continuous feedback. Agile emphasizes user stories to validate customer requirements; test-driven development to reduce mistakes; biweekly iterations of new software releases; and velocity to measure progress. We will introduce all these elements of the Agile development cycle, and go through one iteration by adding features to a simple app and deploying it on the cloud using tools like Github, Cucumber, RSpec, RCov, Pivotal Tracker, and Heroku.

Prerequisites for the course are: Programming proficiency in an object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby. Basic Unix command-line skills are helpful; we will provide a cheat sheet. You must also have a computer running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or Solaris operating systems and running x86 or AMD64/Intel64 hardware on which you can install and run VirtualBox virtual machine. It should have at least 512 MB of memory, or at least 1 GB if running Windows. See www.virtualbox.org.

Recommended Textbook: "Engineering Long-Lasting Software: An Agile Approach Using SaaS and Cloud Computing," Beta Edition, by Armando Fox and David Patterson, to be available January 17, 2012.

You can register for the course here.

Free Online Course on Technology Entrepreneurship from Stanford University

Chuck Eesley (Professor in Stanford University's Management Science & Engineering group) will be taking a course on Technology Entrepreneurship in January 2012.

The class will mix in-depth case studies and research on the entrepreneurial process. How do you create a successful start-up? What is entrepreneurial leadership in a large firm? What are the differences between an idea and true opportunity? How does an entrepreneur form a team and gather the resources necessary to create a great enterprise? This and many more are areas that will be covered by Professor Chuck Eesley.

Register for the course here.

Harvard University Free Courses

Harvard Extension School is offering free course audios and videos in Computer Science. The course, Intensive Introduction to Computer Science, is an introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science. Topics include algorithms (their design, implementation, and analysis); software development (abstraction, encapsulation, data structures, debugging, and testing); architecture of computers (low-level data representation and instruction processing); computer systems (programming languages, compilers, operating systems, and databases); and computers in the real world (networks, websites, security, forensics, and cryptography). The course teaches students how to think more carefully and how to solve problems more effectively. Problem sets involve extensive programming in C as well as PHP and JavaScript. The Quicktime and MP3 formats are available for download, or you can play the Flash version directly.