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Blended Learning Resources


SimBio has produced a suite of commercial courseware for introductory college courses in biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and cellular biology. The emphasis is on active learning, or having students learn concepts through virtual experiment or simulation activities. The materials are highly modular, as is the pricing structure. Faculty can adopt entire collections of material on different subjects (ex. ecology), or they can adopt a single chapter, lab, or tutorial or a customized package somewhere in...

This is a fun introduction to coding through simple online Java lessons.

Statsnotes provides notes on a variety of topics, including the applications of statistics using Excel and SPSS. The notes include links to online quizzes including descriptive statistics and analyzing graphs.


A free, open collection of college course material hosted by Saylor Foundation. It is designed to replicate an entire college curriculum with freely available course materials, although they do not offer college credit. (Eventually they will to host all materials on their own site so they can ensure long-term stewardship, but in currently some is available only through links to other sites). Currently the courses consist largely of recorded lectures and readings. There are a few quizzes, but few interactive...

The United Nations University's website on e-learning. They focus mostly on graduate-level studies, and offer free courses in fields like development, public health, business, water management, etc. More useful for LACs is the overview of e-learning at a global level, with links to communities of practice, quality assurance initiatives, etc. around the world. They also provide digitized copies of many of the...

Began as a series of video lectures in mathematics, goal is now to cover a range of topics at K-12 and college level. Khan has also branched out to tutorials/formative assessment exercises, currently mostly in math -- these contain links to associated videos where students can watch worked examples. Instructors can set up a "coach" account, and have students sign up to view their progress. See Salman Khan's TED...

A clearinghouse for open educational resources (courses and components, computer-based and "traditional") around the world. Includes K-12 and college.

U Michigan's searchable database of OER. Much of the material offered is non-interactive (e.g., lectures, notes, pdfs of assignments, etc.) and graduate and professional programs are better represented than the liberal arts.

The Open University in the UK is one of the leaders in online course development and is committed to developing open-source educational resources. They have made modules from their online courses (similar to OLI's) in a variety of subjects available for free through the Learning Space, and they have tried to make it easier for instructors to copy pieces of that material if they don't want to use all of it. They have skills-building modules as well as subject-oriented ones, which may be useful as...

Website of the Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco. No courseware, but links to some fabulous multimedia and interactive features and offline "things to make and do" activities that the museum has developed on a wide range of topics related to math, science, art, and human understanding. Elementary school to adults. The Exploratorium also offers two apps, "Sound Uncovered" and "Color Uncovered," which are free, interactive iPad books.