My Junior Year Lineup

The choice of courses for junior year of the Degree of Freedom One Year BA project (which will run from July through September) is being driven by the need to focus on my major (which means finding and taking more advanced philosophy courses).  And since these are harder to come by in the MOOCiverse (at least for now), I’ll be doing some experimentation this quarter with free learning modalities I’ve not tried yet.

For instance, in previous posts I’ve mentioned Saylor.org which curates existing Web resources into course offerings on various subjects (including philosophy).  I had hoped their promised course on Pragmatism would be available by now, but absent that, their higher-level course on Existentialism is on the junior year list which means you’ll be hearing more about the Saylor brand of free learning in the coming weeks and months.

Similarly, I’ve decided to try a variation on Scott Young’s MIT Challenge approach in order to focus on a single philosopher (Immanuel Kant) absent the availability of a MOOC focusing on just his work.  Which means I’ll be leveraging MIT Open Courseware while also tapping into other resources (such as a series of Oxford lectures available via iTunes) to try to piece together my own college-level independent study program on the subject which I plan to complete before the end of September.

Other than that, the list somewhat reflects my growing interest in the Ancient Greeks (inspired by edX’s Greek Heroes class).

Here’s the summer run down:

Course: English Common Law
Institution: University of London
Provider: Coursera
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: 1

Course: Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Provider: Coursera
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: 1 (Major – Intermediate/Advanced)

Course: Shakespeare After All – The Late Plays
Institution: Harvard University
Provider: edX
Category: Humanities
Credits: 1

Course: Introduction to Psychology
Institution: San Jose State University
Provider: Udacity
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: 1

Course: Ancient Greek Religion
Institution: Independent/Colgate
Provider: Udemy
Category: Humanities
Credits: .5

Course: Existentialism
Institution: Independent
Provider: Saylor.org
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: 1 (Major – Intermediate/Advanced)

Course: Introduction to Ancient Greek History
Institution: Yale University
Provider: Open Yale/iTunes
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: 1

Course: Augustine: Philosopher and Saint 
Institution: Yale University
Provider: Great Courses
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: .5 (Major)

Course: Immanuel Kant
Institution: MIT/Oxford
Provider: MIT Open Courseware/iTunes U
Category: Social Sciences
Credits: 1 (Major – Intermediate/Advanced)

Given that new courses might become available during the quarter, I reserve the right to modify this list if something interesting pops up , if one of the courses on my current list comes a cropper, or if I have an existentialist crisis or nervous breakdown over the summer.