NYNP blog post 5-29-09

Resources for free university-quality educational materials
Trainers can use emerging web-based resources to create cost-effective, high quality training

For those of us looking for free ways to professionally develop our organizations' staff, it may be worthwhile to access free video, audio, lecture notes, lab demonstrations, and exams from university classes and events.

YouTube Edu
YouTube Edu, available at www.youtube.com/edu, offers videos and channels from their college and university partners. Examples of these partners include Columbia Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership, and trainers could use video from either of these partners as a training tool to develop staff's business and leadership skills.

iTunes U
iTunes U offers over 75,000 recordings of commencement speeches, lectures, classes, lab demonstrations, and more, accessible through the iTunes store. Colleges and universities such as Stanford, Oxford, and Emory have set up sites, as have museums, PBS stations, and other educational organizations such as the NY Public Library. Trainers could use the podcasts available here as prerequisite assignments to prepare staff for particular workshops, to deepen staff's expertise on subjects relevant to the organization's mission, or to provoke thoughtful and informed discussion.

Individual Universities
Other universities have chosen to create their own websites with free resources; UC Berkeley and MIT are prominent examples. UC Berkeley's http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ offers video and audio podcasts from a wide variety of lectures and events, and MIT's Open Courseware at http://ocw.mit.edu offers free lecture notes, class materials, exams, and videos from 1,900 courses, with no registration required. For example, MIT's Sloan School of Management offers class materials for both undergraduate and graduate-level course, and trainers could use the wealth of case studies, assignments, self-evaluation s, and more to create workshop activities with the credibility of coming from a world class business school.