Open Courseware Initiative : Fundamentals of Electronics

Welcome to the Open Courseware Initiative only on Steemit!

After getting Adafruit to look at steemit, I've been inspired to create the first 100% complete, online course for steemians around the world, who want to learn about electronics but have never had the time or resources.

The blockchain has a lot of potential here to ensure complete academic authenticity and I want to demonstrate this potential to existing colleges and universities and bring them over to steemit.

My end goal with all of this is to create the world's first, completely online, blockchain backed, associates degree program issued by an accredited school. Eventually we may even convince schools to add a full bachelors or more, right now we're just demonstrating the power of the blockchain to reach out to underserved areas and busy professionals alike.

Before we do that though, we need a model course that can be used as a template for future educators.

That's what I'm building here. This course will have classes that take you rapidly from core electronics theory, all the way to digital circuitry using discrete components. It will be thorough, rigorous and I will grade each student on an objective list of criteria detailed in the class notes.

You will also be grading me, if there is anything that is unclear or god forbid, inaccurate, I need to know about it right away so I can clarify for future students.

At least once every two weeks, I will upload custom course material that builds on the previous class. This is leading to a final project where you design, build and test a custom electronics project from scratch, demonstrating competency in electronics design and engineering.

If this course is a success, I will follow it up next year with an "advanced electronics" course that will go into depth with microcontrollers, FPGAs etc.

This course is a hands on, practical course, and my goal is to give you solder ready projects you can build affordably at home, hopefully with things you already have laying around. So get those junk drawers organized and soldering irons to the ready!

To complete this course you will need a good quality soldering iron, some solder, various lengths of wire and a multi-meter.

All of these should be available at your local hardware store or electronics retailer. They are also sold by adafruit and sparkfun. In the USA with the closure of radioshack, I have had great success with harbor freight. While in Mexico I'm predominantly buying from Steren, but in general, real electronics stores are becoming an endangered species, which is heartbreaking to me.

As far as the classes are concerned. You will have homework and you will be graded. You should do this homework on your blog and then link your blog entry in the comments below each course. Once you do this, I will head over there and grade it. Please be careful to tag things appropriately if given a specific tag to use. We are working on some software to build a portfolio of homework and it will be tag driven.

There is no time limit to either start or complete any course, but to receive a certificate of completion, you will need to complete all courses in order.

Courses are completely free and all designs are licensed under an open hardware license. You can even build your own course material deriving directly from it, but make sure to give credit where credit is due and link back to the blog.

Fundamentals of Electronics classes and homework will be available under the OCIFE tag. The first class will be OCIFE01 .. all the way to the final class, OCIFE25

Course outline...
01 : Basic Theory - Ohm's Law & others
02 : The Black Cat Has A Long Tail - Component Identification Made Easy
03 : Reading Schematic Diagrams
04 : Soldering The Right Way
05 : AC vs DC
06 : Building Powerful Magnets
07 : LCR the basics
08 : Tuned LCR
09 : Build an analog variable timing circuit
10 : Build an AM radio
11 : Build an FM radio
12 : Operational Amplifiers (OPAMPS)
13 : Build an Audio Amplifier
14 : Surge suppression and power filtering
15 : Build a regulated power supply
16 : Build an uninterruptible power supply
17 : Introduction to digital logic
18 : Logic In Action - DTL / TTL / ECL
19 : Discrete Logic Circuits and their uses
20 : Chip Tunes & Circuit Bending! - Fun with the 555*
20.5 : Build an 808 drum*
21 : Counters, Adders, Multipliers & Dividers
22 : Display Types
23 : Display Drivers
24 : Build a Wall Clock
25 : Final Project

I hope this is exciting to everyone. I've contacted my own Alma Mater asking them to watch the engagement levels on this course, to judge whether it would be feasible to officially endorse this style of learning with at least a certificate of completion from an accredited institution. The response was "Show us that this works first".

I know there are several professional educators involved on steemit right now. I encourage you to join the Open Courseware Initiative either directly, by creating new course material integrating the power of steemit, or indirectly by asking your institution to look at this style of education as a way of allowing students to earn certificates, credits or even whole degrees.

For potential students, follow me if you aren't doing so already but most importantly, find a good quality soldering iron and multimeter as well as a supply of solder and wire. None of these should be very expensive, a high quality complete kit, can be had for less than $50 and you can get by just fine with $15 in kit. These are foundational things that everyone must have to complete each class.

If you have any questions about any class, I will try to spend a few hours each day monitoring steemstem on steemit.chat so hop in there.

*I may do the 555 class early, since I'd like to make that class a week or so before Christmas, because the end result is a fun gift to make, especially for kids.