Assistants: Loving to teach and learn

Find a tutor, teacher or assistant in your neighborhood on Sunshine Help to complement online coursework available from first class schools.

Here´s quite a lofty mission….. giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. This is the mission of Academic Earth, working to remove barriers for anyone wanting to achieve a world-class education. They are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Their goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

Courses are offered under a Creative Commons license through open course programs at the universities. Associated materials include lecture transcripts, handouts, reading assignments, tests and problem sets; some classes are also available as podcasts. Look for your favorite subject online at the Academic Earth site.

Did you know that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (yes, the MIT) offers free online college courses? Their “Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds” philosophy has been extended to open course ware, a web-based publication of educational materials. While many of the courses do not have video lectures, there are class notes in PDFs along with tests and homework.  These courses are available via the Internet, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world – the same material used in the teaching of almost all MIT undergraduate and graduate courses taught in the Institute’s five schools — the Schools of Architecture and Planning; Engineering; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Science; and the Sloan School of Management.

Not to be outdone by MIT, the University of California at Berkely offers podcasts and webcasts of some of the lectures taking place on campus.  Courses have an RSS feed to track each new lecture. For printable assignments and notes you can check the professors homepage, which is usually given in the first lecture or google his name. Even though the notes, homework and tests are not directly printed on the school´s website as they are in MIT and other courseware sites, it is really not a problem to find them.

Other university-based online coursework include Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Utah State´s RSS Feeds, and courses offered by Tufts University and Johns Hopkins.  Even Yale, Princeton and Georgetown have gotten on the online bandwagon by offering web-based courses, lectures and other material.

Seattle-based TeachStreet is an online community for “people who love to learn”, or so claims the site that launced in 2007.  Students can search for subject matters to learn, and teachers can post their availability for teaching classes.  The site´s most popular subjects include  tennis, piano, cooking,  and ……Texas Hold ‘em Poker?

Of course, you can always find great resources in your neighborhood to help with your learning goals by seaching the Sunshine Help online directory of  tutors, teachers and assistants. Our goal is to use the latest online technologies to facilitate real-world connections and the best resources available.  If you are knowledgeable in a subject you want to teach, sign up online to post your classes.

Knowledge – what a terrible thing to waste!

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