CTL 000: Center for Teaching and Learning: Living Syllabus

Searchable/ browseable collections 

MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching  -- "find peer-reviewed online teaching andl learning materials."Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Find peer reviewed

Intute -- a "free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners."

Lola Exchange - Learning Objects, Learning Activities  (Wesleyan University)

Many colleges and universities are participating in the OpenCourseWare initiative - making the content from their credit courses available on the web.  This might include video or audio lectures, slideshows, handouts, assignments, or some combination of these different types of content.  Here are some guides to browse:

(All links will open in new windows/tabs) 

Free Learning resources from the Open University

A comprehensive list at the Open Courseware Consortium

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Open Courseware Project

MIT Open Courseware

Notre Dame Open Courseware

Current courses from UC Berkeley

With search engines like Google, you will definitely be able to find scholarly and expert information.  But you'll have to sift through a lot of other stuff as well.  Try some of these sources and sites as well --

CiteULike --

CiteULike is a service that allows you to create an online "favorites" list of scholarly sources.  This is a great way to keep yourself organized.  But it is also a great place to find information.  Because thousands of other people are using the service to store their favorites, you can search within this pool of sources - and know you're finding stuff that at least some people would recommend.

ScienceBlogs : This project aggregates blogs on topics across the sciences, including some social sciences.  Authors discuss scholarly and scientific research in a way that is accessible to general audiences.  One of the best features is their "Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research" icon, which lets you see at a glance when they are analyzing information from the journals.

Home: Nature Blogs :  Nature, one of the most respected scholarly journals, also provides a wealth of more informal scholarly information on their website.  This page will take you to a directory of Nature blogs, on lots of topics.  These are a great place to find entry-level discussions of scholarly research, as well as expert conversations.

Google Scholar --

Google Scholar is Google's attempt at creating a scholarly search engine.  Using complex algorithms, Google's computers can identify sites that look like they might be scholarly sources.  It's a great place to scan a lot of different sources to see what's out there on a topic.  Make sure that you set your preferences so it will connect you to the library's digitial subscriptions.

Scirus --

[from the site] "With over 450 million scientific items indexed at last count, it allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information."