It’s less than a fortnight since the Governing Council of Makerere University declared the University closed until further notice, as a result of industrial action by the lecturers.
Industrial action and demonstrations are a perennial fixture at Uganda’s oldest university and mostly result into prolonged semesters and shortened vacations. With the latest break students can utilise their time by taking up online courses.
Stanford Online
Stanford Online offers a variety of professional education opportunities in conjunction with many of the University’s schools and departments, and free online courses taught by Stanford faculty to lifelong learners worldwide.
Some of the courses – particularly the Professional courses – will require a fee (as low as $80 to as high as $995 for Building Business Models). Majority of the Self-Paced and Self-Study courses are free of charge. The Self-Paced options include Introduction to Computer Networking, Molecular Foundations of Medicing, Network Security and Statistical Reasoning.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom.
Founded by MIT graduate Salman Khan in 2006, the platform offers instruction in math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more. All Khan Academy resources are free of charge. The Khan Academy channel on YouTube has more than 2.6 million subscribers and the Khan Academy videos have been viewed more than 840 million times.
Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale University undergraduate courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.
Courses usually span 20+ lectures, with each lecture covering 75 minutes. The platform provides audio, video, lecture transcripts and lecture notes downloadable free of charge from the website. Courses include Financial Theory, African American History, Introduction to Psychology and Moral Foundations of Politics.
Established in December 2007, the platform does not require registration. As such no course credits or certificates are available through the programme.
Coursera
Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take. Partner organisations include the University of Cape Town, Stanford, Princeton, Duke, Yale, The Curtis Institute of Music and the Museum of Modern Art.
Founded in 2012, Coursera has gone on to become the largest provider of Massive Open Online Courses. As of September last year, there were 15 million registered users.
MIT OCW
MIT OCW: The web-based application is a doorway to course content from the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over 2,300 courses are available oline, ranging from social sciences, engineering, physical and biological sciences.
Video lectures are included for 80 of the courses available.
edX
edX: The partnership started up as a venture between MITx and Harvardx, and now boasts of partner institutions that include UC Berkeley, Australian National University, Aachen University and the Sorbonne.