For those of us with college bound students, we face the intimidating task of tackling some hard subjects if we want to provide our kids with advanced placement courses. Advanced placement courses are basically courses equivalent in rigor and content to what college freshman do, but done during the high school years. These are terrific for gifted and students passionate in a specific subject area, giving a student a taste of college level work, and preparing students for CLEP exams.

The problem is that very few homeschool resources exist for AP courses. Enter the open courseware movement begun by MIT. MIT decided to make their classes open to the public. You do not get college credit, will generally not have access to the end of module exams, or access to the instructor, but you get all the content delivered via the internet. Several other universities have followed suit and made many of their courses open to the public too.

Here are a few links to universities that are pursuing open courseware:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html  This is MIT's open courseware. They have over 500 courses in the public domain.

http://www.cmu.edu/oli/ This one is Carnegie Mellon's open courseware site. I will give a review of some of theirs below.

http://ocw.usu.edu/Index/ECIndex_view Utah State's open courseware.

http://ocw.tufts.edu/?WT.mc_id=Link1 Tuft University

http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/browse.cfm World Lecture Hall - Texas University in Austin.

Let's take a closer look at a few of the courses from Carnegie Mellon just to get a taste of what these courses are like. Many of these are currently under development so you will need to look at the course a bit before rushing headlong into using them as the foundation for your AP course.

An example of this is the Physics course. At this point, the author cautions that it is developed enough to be an outstanding supplemental resource but that the 'online textbook' has not yet been added. Even as it stands, it is an excellent tool. It has over 350 computer tutored exercises using the Andes Physics Tutor developed at the University of Pittsberg and the Naval Academy. I taught a homeschool high school physics co-op last year and would have loved to have known about this. It would have made the math and physics so much easier to teach and understand.

Another course well on its way to being developed is Biology. This one has interactive computer scores quizes scattered through the reading content. It is a great way to check understanding on the fly. It uses Flashmole which is incredibly helpful with the chemistry side of things. You can litterally turn the molecules around to see them from every angle. There are interactives and Flash movies. A feature called 'Many Student's Wonder' gives student access to articles on topics that pop up in the content. These are kept distinct from the regular content because the student will not be tested on it. That allows interested students to go beyond yet not overload others who need to stay focused on the primary material.

Chemistry looks awesome, though when I browsed through the course last night there wrer many broken links. That might have been a temporary problem or it may be a sign that the course has been abandoned. It looks to be complete. Features of this course is an embedded virtual lab. The virtual lab gives you lab equipment and supplies that you can control virtually with your computer. I have used this software before and it is outstanding. The course is loaded with many Quicktime movies to demonstrate concepts.

I have used some of MIT's open courses in the past and can vouch for how useful they are. I particularly enjoyed the freshman physics course. You get to watch very enjoyable lectures. DSL or faster is highly advised. I was using dial up at the time. Dial up will give a stuttery movie which is particularly problematic when the professor is writing on the chalkboard.