Learning is a pursuit which can only be positive for us. Even if we learn something that we don’t think we need to know, it may serve you in an unexpected way at some point in your life.

Not all of us can stay in school forever though, so I present to you some of the great sites for college and university level video lectures. No offense meant to people from other countries with top notch institutes, yet a lot of these sites are from the United States of America. Of course, there’s always the Video Professor too!

WebCast UC Berkeley

Berkeley has a long reputation of being progressive in education technology. I think you’ll love this site due to the sheer number of free java video lectures that are available. Some of the titles that appeal to me, that aren’t ordinary Intro To courses, are the Foundations of American Cyber-Culture and Psychology of Dreams.

Definitely not going to find those courses at my local college. Something else that is appealing is that you can subscribe to these courses via RSS.

MIT Video Lectures (Open CourseWare)

Another legendary university for its contributions to society, especially Richard Stallman’s concept of Freeware, MIT has a plethora of courses and video lectures available to the public.

Of course, there are a ton of technical lectures, otherwise it would be the Massachusetts Institute of Stuff, yet there are many wonderful lectures in the humanities and liberal arts. In the languages, you could learn French, German, Chinese, Japanese and other cool languages.

It’s a bit difficult to determine exactly what courses have video content, since they use a catch-all categorization of multimedia. Either way, access to this knowledge without huge tuition fees is a beautiful thing.

COOL McGill

COOL stands for COurses OnLine. Cheesy? Yes. Cool? Oh yes.

Of course I had to include this since it is a Canadian university, in Montreal, Quebec. McGill is known as one of the premier medical schools in North America, so you’ll find that a lot of the courses there are based in the life sciences – things such as chemistry, biology and physiology. You’ll find other courses in other disciplines here, too.

The University of Oxford on iTunes U

Did you know about iTunes U? I didn’t. Often I’m the last to know though. Even cooler than iTunes U though is the fact that Oxford is on there. Oxford. One of the oldest universities in the world. Illustrious, grand, even regal.

Is it any better than any other top notch university? I don’t know. However it was ranked 4th in the world in 2008. So the ability to access the knowledge of their academia is definitely a privilege. I urge you to check it out.

Oxford also has the number one lecture on iTunes U right now, from Marianne Talbot with her “Romp through the history of philosophy“. Look it up. It’s good.

iTunes U

Speaking of iTunes, this has to be the best collection of video lectures on the Internet. Why? Because there are so many lectures from so many world class institutions gathered under one umbrella. I’ve tried to access the site through my web browser with no real luck, so it seems to me that you will need the iTunes client.

As you can see from the graphic, Duke, Cornell and other great schools are represented here as well as Wharton, Yale, and Stanford. On top of that, there are great lectures from museum personnel and research institutes. I guess I know what I’m downloading this week!

I hope you enjoy this list as much as I did researching it. Go ahead and try watching a few lectures. You know, you tend not to fall asleep as much when you have been at a pub crawl the previous night.

Let me know what your favourite lecture is and why. I’d really appreciate that.