What began as a family of loosely organised guilds and  dedicated guardians of knowledge in the Medieval period of Europe is now a vibrant and established global institution. The university is a trusted and reputable source of the world’s most up-to-date understanding. By studying with these exclusive schools, scholars found themselves submerged in the thinking style of the day, with the openings presenting themselves as the common problems of wisdom became the windows of exploration. Big name places like Oxford, Paris, and Bologna were the archetype for what was to come.

Over the following centuries, as the university educational principle became more widely understood and sought after, more centres opened all over the world. With fees and aptitude requirements, only those who found themselves able and willing could study there. It has meant that those without the resource or without the learning are left on the sidelines, never able to access the high-quality information on offer. Many colleges and universities made it a theme to offer free courses to the general public to enable others to raise their standard of education. 

The internet opened this up further by allowing digital access to some of the world’s most popular courses. At first with text, then with images and sound, and now in full video, entire courses can be taught with the advent of this new technology. Business and education began working together, with digital resources linking people to high-grade paid and free courses. A democratisation of information has begun to open out as more people around the world can find something of use or interest. With places like FutureLearn offering a global selection of affordable university degrees and free microcredentials in cutting-edge subjects, the standard professor-led lecture course still holds true ground. YouTube is where many professors go to upload their content for free viewing and study, and here is a list of 50 of them. Enjoy. 

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If you’ve ever taken a literature course at school, then you’ll likely have been struck by how much in-depth application of thought goes into the simple act of reading. In the early days, reading in class was just about getting used to the words and enjoying the story. We might have gone into some depth when it comes to structure or storytelling, but the main exercise was to enjoy the writing. Moving on to academic literature was like opening a door we didn’t even know was there until someone pointed it out. There is a universe of depth beneath the best stories and if we know how to open the door to it, it gladly lets us walk around.  
 
Of course, the main element of why we read stories is for the enjoyment of it. If we didn’t take pleasure in the art of writing, then we’d not bother to read it beyond the necessary. Many people prefer the pages of a book to the flickering screen or the scratchy radio. Most of us are content with a variety of the three. Why bother to go any further than this? Why do people apply theory and rationale to stories that go way beyond the contents of the page?  
 
Reading stories that are true to life in certain aspects can help us to understand these truths in a way that transcends the usual observer. Being involved with the story puts us in the shoes of the culture and its behaviours giving us a true awareness of the experience we wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. We can get to grips with social situations that might be alien to us and we can learn what it’s like to be one of the group before we’ve even met them.  
 
The complex and inventive storytelling architecture can become influential across genres and scopes. A style, a method, and a progression can all be translated into other scenarios with completely new backgrounds. Often, it’s the appreciation of clever ideas that provide us the motivation to have our own or to mirror what we like into our own working projects. It’s not just our projects that benefit; a good story can become a real-life motivator for home and work. By learning about people and their virtues, we can be truly influenced by someone completely fictional. 
 
Have you ever felt for the people in the story? Empathy is something we all have to practice. Our imaginations can only perceive the emotion in someone else if we can appreciate where it comes from, the thinking that accompany it, and the kind of mental picture it creates. If we’ve not been in a person’s shoes before then we are severely limited in how to appreciate someone’s humanity. Everything becomes dry and intellectualised which, in the real world, often results in lost rapport. When we learn from literature, the facts might be made up but the people in the story are represented in a true-to-life way. That’s why we enjoy the stories and it’s why we want to find out what happens next. We relate to the people that we feel the most affiliation to. This is why the best stories have vivid and colourful characters who artfully represent the reality of our lives.  
 
 The way we learn language as children is by listening and repeating. We build the pictures in the mind as we learn how phrases are used. The words themselves come later, with expressions of sound being our first attempt. Babble is a baby's first attempt at replicating human speech. By the time we’ve learned to read, we know a lot of words and their phrases. But we don’t stop there. The process continues. Reading gives us instant access to ways of speaking that we might not be exposed to in our local environment. The writing from around the world and from across the centuries can enrich our vocabulary beyond what any illiterate life could provide. The more we can say, the more we can achieve.  
 
Perhaps the most valuable part of studying literature at an academic level is the ability to think critically. When we critically assess a story, we don’t just judge the people are villains and heroes, we look at them as human beings or complete creatures with rich and valid emotional lives. The systems the story purveys and the relationships between characters invite us to think about the validity of what’s going on the reasons why things are this way, and what, if anything could be done to affect the world. A make-believe scenario gives us a playground to be politicians and lawyers, historians and warriors, so we can learn about how to apply genuine power in the genuine world.  
 
Dive into academic literature for free with these YouTube playlists. 
 
Various Sources – English literature over 200 videos 
 
Paul H. Fry – Introduction to the Theory of Literature 
 
Amy Hungerford – The Amercian Novel Since 1945 
 
Various Sources – English Literature lectures 50 Videos 
 
Langdon Hammer – Modern Poetry 
 
Bob Ahlersmeyer – British Literature 
 
Dale B. Martin – New Testament Literature 
 
John Rogers – Milton 
 
Harvard – Shakespeare After All 
 
Refaat Alareer – English Poetry 
 
Merin Simi Raj – History Of English Language and Literature 
 
Klasify Academy – Literature in English 
 
This covers a lot from a wide variety of people and backgrounds. Naturally, the content on YouTube is changing all the time and more great literature courses might appear or become findable on search over time. Once you’ve sifted these, do keep your eyes open for anything else the algorithm suggests. Comment with your discoveries. 

If you're one of those people who like to keep professional courses forever and go the extra mile with your learning, you can find affordable and professionally tutored literature courses here.​
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YouTube is one of those fantastic inventions that means anyone can get the information they need in video form. Sure, the majority of it is hype, irrelevant, sometimes plain wrong, and often naive, welcome to a democratic society. You have to do a bit of work to uncover the golden material, like a paleoarchaeologist, we brush away the crud and the muck to find the beautiful specimens waiting for us to admire. Deciphering where they belong on the grand scale of usefulness often means spending time with the content, watching, waiting for them to slip up somewhere. If they pass this brutal test of authenticity and reliability, we can feel assured in sharing the video with our people and perpetuating the good stuff against the favour of the bad.  
 
As a person born in England, to hear the term British Literature puts me in an outsider’s position. It’s called usually English Literature, even if the author was not English. If it was written in the language, it counts. British Literature, then, is a different subject. It considers works written by the British, and not necessarily in Modern English. A history of the subject must start at the beginning, and in this case, that was a time when the Latin speaking Romans left the administration opening the gates for Saxons and Angles from the German lands and the Norse from Scandinavia. The merging of these three major cultures along with the traditional homegrown Jutes, Picts, Iceni, Gaels, and Britons among others who were already here, the British and English language evolved from this pot of diverse people. Latin remained as part of the Roman Catholic Church, which established itself only a few generations after the emperors packed up. 
 
It didn’t end there, once this set-up had been left to run its course for a few hundred years, we had another inclusion of European language. The Norman invasion of 1066 saw King William defeat Harold Godwinson after his predecessor broke his promise to join the Norman and British Kingdoms. Taking the land by force, William of Normandy became the King of England and insisted that French words were used by the nobility. Because of this new influx of literary tools, the dictionary of the common people grew to incorporate this new vernacular.  
 
The way people communicate words, their meanings, and ideas that can be built from them is through literature. It therefore seems important to study the history of British literature so we can understand the evolution of the culture from a linguistic point of view. As the British personality is constructed of all the influences that surround it, the literature often gives us the best clues as to how this works from a third-person perspective. Understanding the layering of culture that decided what was right and wrong through the application of story and instruction over the two thousand years since the birth of modern British culture can help us define the future for all English-speaking people in ways that are relevant, meaningful, and effective.  
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Enjoy this Full course in the History of British Literature from Bob Ahlersmeyer

If you'd like to go even deeper into the subject and get a premium level knowledge of our shared language, I'd recommend this extraordinary book. 

Dinosaurs are a source of unending fascination. We can all imagine what they were like, living their giant and reptilian lives among the archaic trees and mountains. The water we drink today was once enjoyed by one of these legendary beasts, whose living ancestors thrive as members of the bird family. Have you ever looked into the eyes of a hen and seen the reptilian stare looking back at you? It must be like looking into the eyes of a dinosaur.
 
The study of fossils is a slow and rigorous process. We can only look at what we have, and the discoveries are not easy to find. From the beginnings of the science, palaeontologists have managed to uncover a large and wide-reaching collection of plant and animal remains that help to tell the story of our own evolution. We can see how varying changes have taken place over time to result in new aspects of life that ultimately become defining features of a species. The best and most efficient biology is maintained as the antiquated and obsolete mechanisms are often left to history. As vast changes have taken place in our local environments, the types of system that thrive have changed too, meaning that life is filtered even further towards the adaptive premium.
 
Uploaded to YouTube is a full section of a university Geology course dedicated to the study of fossils and the processes that form them. Taught by Professor Thomas Holtz, GEOL104 consists of 49 videos each of about 50 mins length. The first entry is an introduction and can be skipped if you want to get straight into the information. A slow and steady pace is given with a generous amount of talking around the subject. This is helpful to give the mind time to digest what is being given, and possibly a skill I am yet to learn! Never-the-less, I highly recommend taking the time to watch these lectures in order so you too can get to grips with the prehistoric record.
 
The end-result for creatives will be a deeper insight into what processes take place in the building of solutions to problems and the creation of new opportunities. A creative trial and error approach akin to natural selection and adaption can be a powerful analogy when finding ways to diversify your own output and come up with new and fascinating adventures to create. The time periods involved can also help us to be patient with ourselves as it takes months and years to make progress, nature can take a lot longer and no-one seems to mind that much. Stability is a good thing when it comes to our daily lives. 

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​Human creativity is a mere reflection in the pool of what the universe does all the time. From the days of the beginning, when the laws of physics were put into action, to the modern day with stars and galaxies stretching out as far as the eye can see, creation itself shows us what is possible from just a few raw ingredients. The entire visible universe is made of protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons. The relationship between these things is well-defined and in knowing the rules, scientists have been able to look deep into the night sky and figure out what is going on.
 
From these basic raw ingredients and the laws that govern their behaviour, the universe is able to create all manner of complex and enormous constructions. Stars and planets have formed in every possible way that we can think of and more, plumes of dust span huge distances that mean we see them over a period of millions of years in one view because of the finite speed of light, with the furthest side being so far away that the light we receive is much older than the light we see from the near side.
 
Galaxies are completely extraordinary in their diversity. Spirals with varying arms and colours, globular forms, ellipses, and clusters all take on differing forms based on a few set rules. The different colours and effects of material, light, and gravity produce a spectacular array of shapes, colours, densities, and behaviours. Each one can be studied in so much depth that you can uncover an almost infinite amount of information about its contents and how it moves through space.
 
From the very big to the very small, living creatures have been able to use these same basic ingredients to allow the universe to perceive itself through its own material. The laws of the universe have allowed its contents to assemble in such a way that a conscious understanding of what it is can be achieved. It’s completely remarkable how this has been achieved from what is believed to be nothing. Where did these laws come from that allows such things to happen? Who knows, but what we do know has been put down in video lecture form for us all to learn from and enjoy.
 
When we learn about one artist, we can decipher their work through an understanding of their life story. We can learn about their motivations, circumstances, history, and achievements in order to appreciate what they produced, why they decided on it, and what makes it so unique. Space is like this, the universe is like an artist with a huge story behind it. By learning the story and by deciphering the encoded wisdom, it’s possible to look way into the distance and figure out what is going on. A complete course that is suitable for people who know very little about the subject and for people who want to refresh their memory, An Introduction To Astronomy is on YouTube from Professor Jason Kendall.
 
A more advanced selection of material is also available, for those of you who want to get a more in-depth understanding of the most up-to-date thinking on the subject.  Enjoy this full-length and free introduction to graduate level astronomy from Jason Kendall. 
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