Hello, All! I just wanted to announce my newest site: TheFreeCollege.com.
For the last few years, several Colleges and Universities have been making their courses available online for free. Unfortunately, they are hard to find! The closest that anyone has come to compiling these in a single location has been iTunesU, but even that is difficult to navigate, search, and wade through to find the good stuff. This is my attempt to change all of that.
TheFreeCollege.com is a simple site where users can "Bookmark" courses that they want to follow, and within those courses, they can mark off the Sessions that they have watched. Of course, you can also rate the courses and leave comments.
What surprised me about the building of this site was how little customization I needed to do. Thankfully, because of my history with Drupal, customizations were generally painless. Custom code was used to find and import Courses and Course Sessions (to the tune of 50,000+!), but because there is no standardization as to how these listings appear in the wild, each one has to be processed by hand to ensure editorial consistency. Most of the listings have to be thrown out because they are not actually Courses but lecture series, podcasts, etc. At the moment, I've only made it through approx. 40% of my original scraping script's nodes.
