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Online Video Lectures and Course Materials from Yale

- Video lectures from the world's top scholars

courses for MBSS

Some of the most basic questions about human existence (how did we develop language? why do we love music and art but kill in war? how did we develop certain eating habits? etc.) come back to a more singular question: how are we different from chimpanzees? This question is slowly getting answered by some of today’s leading primatologists and evolutionary biologists, including Robert Sapolsky, Daniel Lieberman, Richard Wrangham, Jane Goodall, Steven Pinker, all featured above.

What Makes Us Human? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Always wanted to read science fiction? But never knew where to start? io9, a blog dedicated to futurism and sci-fi, has you covered. Today, they published a handy sci-fi syllabus/reading list “intended to introduce the novice student … to the major themes in the genre, as well as books and authors who are representative of different eras in SF lit (including the present day).” The io9 reading list breaks down a vast body of sci-fi literature into six useful categories – 1) Foundational Works/Classics, 2) Utopias and Dystopias, 3) Robots, 4) Aliens, 5) Space Travel, and 6)  Science Fiction as Political Philosophy. Wells, Lovecraft, Huxley, Orwell, Dick, Asimov, Gibson, Heinlein, LeGuin – they’re all on the list.

Related FYIs: you can find many of HP Lovecraft’s writings online here. Thanks Julie for the recent heads up.

Also, you can download an audio version of Huxley narrating A Brave New World here.

Syllabus & Book List for Sci-Fi Newbies is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

The word open is receiving a lot of attention in education circles. Openness in higher education has been discussed recently by writers in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EDUCAUSE Review, and EQ, among other publications.1 In January 2010, The Horizon Report, produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), declared that open content will "reach mainstream use" in higher education within the next twelve months.2 But what does that mean? What is this open we keep hearing about?

This new video from Cambridge University, featuring archaeologist John Robb, gives you a quick and visually appealing introduction to how humans have understood something we take for granted – our own bodies. Covering 10,000 years in six minutes, Robb takes us from the “Animal Body” and “Sexualized Body” of the Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, to the “Politicized Body” of the Classical Age, “God’s Body” of the Middle Ages, and finally “The Body as Machine,” the metaphor we have been living with since 1500. And we wrap up with the “Body Digital,” the body of the future, and “Multiple Bodies.” This video comes from the Cambridge Ideas series available on Cambridge’s YouTube channel.

Seven Ages of the Body is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

"Highlights of Calculus is a series of short videos that introduces the basic ideas of calculus - how it works and why it is important. The intended audience is high school students, college students, or anyone who might need help understanding the subject.

In addition to the videos, there are summary slides and practice problems complete with an audio narration by Professor Strang. You can find these resources to the right of each video."