Distance Education Resources for CALS Faculty
Compiled by the CALS Distance Education Advisory Committee
| ARIADNE - Learning Object Repository | A European Association open to the World, for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse. The core of the ARIADNE infrastructure is a distributed network of learning repositories. |
| CG VLibrary | Gateway to Global Agricultural Knowledge facilitated by CGIAR. |
| CGIAR's On-line Learning Resources | An on-line learning resources repository that aims to promote the discovery, availability, accessibility and re-usability of CGIAR digital content for learning. |
| Connexions | A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute (mainly text). |
| Digital Library for Earth System Education | DLESE is a distributed community effort involving educators, students, and scientists. DLESE resources include electronic materials for both teachers and learners, such as lesson plans, maps, images, data sets, visualizations, assessment activities, curriculum, online courses, and much more. |
| Earth Portal | A comprehensive resource for timely, objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a means for the global scientific community to come together to produce the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on the role of environmental issues in human affairs. |
| EcoLearnIT RLO-System | Open-source digital repository of Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) focused on soil, water and environmental sciences. The system allows users to develop learning material and publish it into a shared digital library. |
| FAO Capacity Building Portal | Learning services supported by FAO in a wide range of agriculturally-related subject areas at local, national, regional, or global dimensions. |
| Florida Space Grant Consortium | A matching grant program from NASA for developing educational materials for space-oriented content. Public and private universities and community colleges in Florida are eligible. |
| Gapminder | A non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels. Excellent video and graphics presentation formats. |
| Harvard Extension School | See some examples of DE courses from Harvard (requires RealPlayer plugin) |
| Henry Stewart Talks | Henry Stewart Talks is very similar to the TED site; for biomedical and life sciences. |
| IFAS Extension – Online pesticide CEUs | Extension modules focused on pesticides. |
| Merlot | Merlot: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. Comprehensive learning material referenced from other web sites on arts, business, education, humanities, mathematics, statistics, science and technology, and social sciences. An agriculture category is now being built. |
| MIT's open courseware site | 1800 online courses from MIT - free to all. Some are merely videotaped lectures. |
| The TED Web site | This site archives "inspired talks from the world’s greatest thinkers and doers". |
| UC Davis digital objects repository | A repository of over 46,000 images, pdf files, extension bulletins, and other learning materials in a very nice searchable and useful web-based format. UC Davis invites others to send them materials. |
| University of Nebraska Crop Technology media repository | A repository of lessons on a variety of topics, many with flash animations. |
| Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics | Various learning objects on agriculture topics based on CGIAR agricultural knowledge base. |
| Wikipedia | The largest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over 7 million articles in 200+ languages. |
| Wikiversity | Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources and learning projects for all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. |
| Worldmapper | Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest (e.g. greenhouse gases, population, land area, pollution, resources, food, disaster, etc.). |