Tufts Open CourseWare Free University Courses

Another university which is offering free open courseware for online learners worldwide to access, is Tufts University. They have followed the MIT open courseware approach in offering online courses at no cost to learners. As with the MIT courses, Tufts does not grant any degrees or certificates and therefore there is no registration required to take any of the courses offered. Also there is no access to faculty to aid your understanding of the materials.

The courses at Tufts Open Course Ware (OCW) are grouped according to school. There are six schools:
- The School of Dental Medicine
- The School of Medicine
- The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
- The Fletcher School – a professional school of international relations
- The Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine
- The School of Arts and Sciences

I checked out a course offered by the School of Arts and Sciences which was called “Tropical Ecology and Conservation”. The manner in which I would have had to study this course would have been to read the items on the supplementary materials reading list. It included two required texts, one optional text, some reference texts, and possibly some other assigned readings, if I could have accessed the journal articles that were given. I do feel that having a list of textbooks and other reference materials would be one way to learn about a subject on your own. However, I do not call that a course. There was no additional information given to go along with the reading.

I then checked on a course from the School of Medicine – that of Genetics. Here, I found that the textbooks were listed and there were also links to website articles. Lectures were given in the form of text and most of them also included slides. An interesting and likely helpful feature here was that the text of the lectures had highlighted important keywords or phrases in one color, and important concepts or main ideas in another color. This appeared to be a course which someone could follow on their own and learn quite a lot if they did the readings and followed the lectures.

Next I checked a graduate course entitled International Multilateral Negotiation offered by the Fletcher School. For this course there was no course content given for anyone to study it through open courseware studies – not even a reading list. I didn’t feel the information given for the on campus students would be of any use to anyone not taking the actual course.

I was rather disappointed with two of these first three courses that I looked at. I therefore decided to look quickly at several more of the offered courses and was much more impressed. There are 10 courses offered in the School of Dental Medicine and they appeared to have most of the lectures and/or slides available to view. The School of Medicine also had good lecture notes/slides for the courses I checked on. Even the School of Arts and Science had courses that included most of the lecture notes, unlike the Tropical Ecology and Conservation course I talked about above.

My conclusion is that there is some excellent university level content available on the Tufts Open Courseware website for online learners. It is mostly in the medical and science field. It is certainly worthwhile to check out the website to see if they have any courses you are interested in. However, make sure you check out the content that is offered before deciding that you will study a particular course. You may find that it is just what you are looking for, but you may not be interested in investing time in one that has very little available in the way of lecture notes to help clarify and give you some direction in your self-directed distance learning.

Here is the URL for the site:

Tufts Open Courseware http://ocw.tufts.edu/