Free Online Courses

If you haven’t been paying attention to the continuing development of online courses being offered for free by major colleges and universities, you really should start looking if you have the desire but not the money to learn all sorts of things.

Currently I am taking a 6-week Berklee College of Music course on Introduction To Music Production (i.e., how to set up and use a computer-based recording studio), and next month will take Introduction To Music Improvisation by well-known musician Gary Burton. Both of these, as well as courses in Intro Guitar and Songwriting, are offered through the Coursera site, which also has tons of courses in many subjects from 62 world universities. These are “live” courses – the class presentation is on video, but there are assignments with deadlines and forums where you can interact with other students.

Individual major universities also have open, free course material that can be viewed at your leisure – MIT’s OpenCourseWare was one of the first, and they are now part of the edX collaborative with Harvard, Wellesley, McGill, Rice and others.

Most of these free opportunities do not earn you official college credit – but if you want to know about the subjects presented for your own use and education these are a great resource. And given the cost of a college education these days plus the difficulty grads have getting a job in their fields afterwards, we may be evolving ways to harness people’s skills without needing an expensive piece of sheepskin – check out this NPR piece on doing brain research via public computer games, and another on a new book about hacking your education.

Friday Faves 01-11-13

This week’s faves include free online courses, some Kickstarter projects, and a kitten in need:

You can take online courses from some major colleges and universities for free at Coursera. I just found that they are offering four courses this spring from Berklee College of Music:

– Starting March 1st: Songwriting and Intro to Music Production

– Starting April 22: Intro to Guitar and Intro to Improvisation

Maybe I’ll ‘see’ you in the Improv course :-)

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Posting Your Music Samples

I’ve shown you how to share files with individuals via YouSendIt. I’ve also talked about using Dropbox and Carbonite to share files among your own devices. But suppose you want to share (legal original) music or sound files to a group of people, e.g., your band, or with the general public?

If you have your own website you can stream MP3s from there – but that could quickly use up your monthly data transfer allotment if the tracks are popular or large. If you are selling the tracks you could set up a Bandcamp account and post them there.

But if these are files like band practice recordings, rough drafts, non-music audio samples, etc. you may prefer to use SoundCloud.

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Friday Faves 01-04-13

Happy New Year! Here are a few new fundraisers worthy of your attention – but first, a bit of self-promotion:

As you may recall, following on some compliments about my non-fiction writing (especially from a successful fiction writer) I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo in November. I did “win” by completing 50,000 words of a novel – my first long form writing of any sort.

Enough people have asked to read it that I’ve decided to serialize as I complete editing chapters. I’ve set up a separate blog for my literary endeavors, WhatBettyWrites.com – the first two chapters of Want It Back are posted now. You can subscribe to get notifications of new postings, or follow along via the Twitter acct @WhatBettyWrites and/or Facebook Page WhatBettyWrites. Feel free to leave feedback on that blog – most helpful to me would be things like “This chapter was interesting/boring/confusing because of ….”

And now on to other interesting links:

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