Browse > Home / Misc / Free Academic Podcasts

Free Academic Podcasts

November 11, 2006 · Print This Article

(Psst! If you need an iPod to enjoy these podcasts, see our iPod Shuffle giveaway. )
About a year ago, I put together a listing 30 or 40 free podcasts of lectures from Universities. When I started putting together another list, I was amazed at how many more lectures are available. The 134 lectures in this list are all free and don’t require any type of authentication–you don’t have to be a student to download them. The links are to the rss feed of class lectures. If you copy the URL and in iTunes click on Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast it will automatically download the lectures and new ones as they become available.

These lectures are a great way to keep your mind sharp during your
daily commute or while exercising. Some of the lectures lend
themselves to this better than others. I’m not sure how much I would
get out of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology I
while driving in heavy traffic, but I suppose it is free to try. Some
of the titles of courses were either funny or just outright strange.
Here are a few of the ones that caught my attention:

I was hoping to find the Physics of Superheros in the list or a Pottery lecture. Maybe next year.

If you need an iPod to listen to lectures with, consider entering our Free iPod Shuffle Contest to win one.

Here is the complete list of 145 podcasts for your educational pleasure:

Written by Mark Shead · Filed Under Misc 
Tagged:

Comments

37 Responses to “Free Academic Podcasts”

  1. Linuxdude on November 11th, 2006 3:27 pm

    Thank you for this list! All of these lectures are interesting! Thank you.

  2. SFM on November 12th, 2006 4:30 am

    http://www.coa.uncc.edu/arch_on_air/

    Here is a great series on architecture from UNC — it covers theory, design, history in an interview format (fantastic guests)

  3. David Barnes on November 12th, 2006 4:43 am

    Thats a nice lisr. Great work.

  4. Shau Sha on November 12th, 2006 5:28 am

    Nice list - shame you couldn’t include the parent URL for each as not all of us have access to (or want to use) RSS.

  5. John on November 12th, 2006 5:49 am

    Havent worked out how to listern to a lecture. Do I need an itune thingy or can I listern to them via my PC.

  6. AJ Cann on November 12th, 2006 6:42 am

    MicrobiologyBytes!
    http://microbiologybytes.wordpress.com/

  7. Mark on November 12th, 2006 8:21 am

    Shau Sha - Sorry I couldn’t give a home page url for each one, but many of the feeds I found didn’t have a home page or listing of the lectures. I think some of theses are only referenced from internal login systems like blackboard, so there isn’t a home page available. You should be able to get the links from the RSS feed in firefox 2.0 pretty easily.

    John — Copy the rss URL (right click on it and say copy this link), then go to iTunes > Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast and past the URL in the box. Also if you have Firefox 2.0 it will show you a list of the audio files so you can download them directly.

  8. MikeB on November 12th, 2006 9:22 am

    Thanks for putting the list together. I found this on digg and i’ve already subscribed to some feeds.

  9. Obie on November 12th, 2006 1:40 pm

    Full list of Berkeley’s podcasts:

    Fall 06:
    http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/feeds.php?semesterid=21

    Spring 06:
    http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course/feeds.php?semesterid=18

    Or just go to Berkeley on iTunes U:
    http://itunes.berkeley.edu

  10. @JHU on November 12th, 2006 1:40 pm

    Johns Hopkins University Podcast: http://podcasting.jhu.edu/

  11. Mark on November 12th, 2006 2:26 pm

    JHU — Thanks for the link. I’ve added all of the John Hopkins podcasts to the list as well.

  12. james savik on November 12th, 2006 4:26 pm

    Something that I missed seeing: math classes.

    Otherwise: thanks for the list.

  13. Tom Abbott on November 13th, 2006 3:53 am

    Can i provide a shameless plug for podcasts from the University of Warwick.

    http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/podcasts

    Cheers

  14. Mark on November 13th, 2006 8:20 am

    Tom–thanks for the link to the Warwick podcasts. I didn’t include them in the list because they aren’t full semester lectures. They look like they are just individual podcasts about specific topics. For a lot of people that may be even more interesting than listening to an entire semester on the same topic.

    It looks like a great resource though and I’m going to subscribe to it. Thanks for posting the link.

  15. jack on November 14th, 2006 12:54 pm

    I recently found a very interesting website:
    http://alreadylinked.com/
    There you can purchase ad space for your Blog etc.

  16. Katarina on November 16th, 2006 5:51 pm

    I like your blog because I have site like yourse.Well done :)

  17. Chris on November 17th, 2006 12:47 pm

    This is also a great site with a ton of public affairs lecutures on many subjects from famous academics, politicians, authors, and scientists.

    Video, podcasts and even transcripts. Check it out.

    http://www.fora.tv

  18. Chris on November 17th, 2006 12:47 pm

    This is also a great site with a ton of public affairs lecutures on many subjects from famous academics, politicians, authors, and scientists.

    Video, podcasts and even transcripts. Check it out.

    http://www.fora.tv

  19. Chris on November 17th, 2006 12:49 pm

    link:

    http://fora.tv/

  20. Chris on November 17th, 2006 12:55 pm

    This is also a great site with a ton of public affairs lecutures on many subjects from famous academics, politicians, authors, and scientists.

    Video, podcasts and even transcripts. Check it out.

    http://www.fora.tv

  21. Kris on November 20th, 2006 3:42 pm

    Is there a way to easily subscribe via iTunes or can you only access these through the RSS feed.

  22. Tiago Alves on November 20th, 2006 6:37 pm

    Don’t know if this would interest you or not. It is a Podcast of guest speakers at the University of San Francisco: http://www.thembapodcast.com Some of the presentations are awesome like the one from AT&T’s CEO Chuck Smith!

  23. Gen on November 27th, 2006 7:12 am

    McGill University also has some publicly-available podcasts of complete course lectures: http://courseware.mcgill.ca/lectures/. They’re organized by term and past podcasts are still accessible from the site. It’s great to have a list like this but it would be awesome to be able to search by subject, term, prof… How scalable is a list of this sort?

  24. Alexander Rose on December 27th, 2006 12:20 am

    We have a podcast of our lecture series on long term thinking including speakers like: Brian Eno, Will Wright, Jared Diamond, Sam Harris and more…

  25. Neil on December 27th, 2006 11:50 pm

    This is awesome! Would you please correct all the “John Hopkins University entries to “Johns Hopkins University”, though?

  26. Jeff Barr on December 28th, 2006 10:25 am

    Great list. I am currently listening to Professor Richard Pogge’s Astronomy 161 from http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/ . Didn’t see it on your page; perhaps you can add it.

  27. Ladarzak on December 28th, 2006 7:40 pm

    To answer some how-to questions above, someone on another site told me I can DL the MP3’s by going to the XML page and finding them individually and downloading them by entering that in the address line of my browser.

    My friend is going to write me a little program, though, to harvest those links from the XML page and download all the MP3s with a many less mouse clicks, though. This will be a bit of open source coding, btw.

    Great list. Thanks.

  28. william hutchins on January 1st, 2007 2:17 pm

    i dunno ha ha boom boom i like the downloads he he he there good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  29. william hutchins on January 1st, 2007 2:17 pm

    i dunno ha ha boom boom i like the downloads he he he there good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  30. H Smith on January 1st, 2007 7:24 pm

    Fantastic site. Very good podcasts. I have added this link to my site as students will find it fascinating.

  31. T. Moore on January 10th, 2007 11:18 am

    Great job on the list of courses. There are a bunch on the MIT Open CourseWare website.

    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/OCWHelp/avocw.htm

  32. guregu on January 13th, 2007 2:23 am

    All the Purdue links are dead. I highly recommend the Physics for Future Presidents offered by Berkeley. The professor did an amazing job and it was never dry.

    The Ohio State Astronomy course is good as well.

    One subject that I noticed was sorely missing from this list was any Art classes. Like Art History or Theory.

    Thanks for the list,
    Greg

  33. Ryan on January 21st, 2007 6:09 pm

    Has anyone downloaded all of Purdue’s Applied Leadership lectures. I was stupid and didn’t download all of them when I had the chance. I loved the lectures, but only have about 1/4 of them. If you could upload them to an FTP or web site I’d love ‘em.

  34. Ryan on January 21st, 2007 7:09 pm

    Can anyone HELP ME?

    I fell in love with the OLS274 Applied Leadership lectures. Unfortunately, I downloaded about half of them before the site was disabled. Can you give me access to just that course, or direct me to where I could get them? I would pay for them, because they are incredible!

    Thanks in advance,
    Ryan
    ryanarm@aol.com

  35. Mark on January 21st, 2007 7:13 pm

    Ryan - I don’t have the lectures you are wanting. If they do the classes again, you may be able to download them at that time.

    I’ll let you know if I find them anywhere else online.

  36. kurt on February 26th, 2007 9:40 am

    All the John Hopkins Podcasts REQUIRE an authenicated IP address.
    Therefore, these podcasts are no longer available to people outside the IP address range of John Hopkins folks.

  37. Samba on June 14th, 2007 6:53 pm

    Some additional podcasts from the University of California, San Diego: http://podcast.ucsd.edu/

Got something to say?