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Free Online Video Education from Top Universities
pkrumins writes "Over the past few years, some of the world's top universities have started offering free video recordings of their lectures.
Being a student, I have enjoyed them and collected them in my bookmarks — until recently I talked to few people, and they did not know about it! So I decided to create a blog about free video education online. I am mostly focusing on physics, mathematics and computer science video lectures."
I generally frown on slashdot submissions of "check out my blog!" but the topic is valid. Why not link to some usefull info directly rather than submitters blog?
Does anyone know of any good Human Physiology lectures online? I have a contract with a professor to read and learn the material over the summer independently, and was wondering if there were any free lectures available.
http://chrono.posterous.com/
Oh come on teach! Algebra? I'll never use that...
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
At the Big 10 University I went to ... we had online videos of the classes available ... but they were mainly designed for off-campus students (not on-campus students). Yet, I noticed in the classes that did have the online videos ... that the in-class attendance was much lower ... and students were missing out on the in-class interaction cause they chose to skip and just watch the vids. I for one, tried those online vids, and didn't like them. I get much more out of the class when I can interact and stop to interrupt the prof if I have a question.
The Berkeley CS61 lectures are available as free podcasts on iTMS, by the way.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Interesting concept, but I don't think those are credit courses. I'd like to take the entirety of college via something like this, or an over-the-web curriculum. Instead, I wait for something like Wikiversity, and perhaps other projects. I helped build this Internet instead of going to college. I'd like to get a some kind of diploma for it -- use the Internet to complete the rest of my education. Wikipedia has been a great non-credit way to make up for my some of my lack of schooling.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
For a compilation for links, I'd rather check a list compiled by a group of people instead of a single blog. A specialized blog may contain links of higher quality over all, but a dynamically-updated list maintained by a large group of users will be updated more often and may contain a larger variety of links. For example, here are del.icio.us links for video+course and online+course tags.
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
For the full college course experience, one could watch these while suffering a hangover, playing Solitaire, holding three or four different conversations via text message or IM, and doodling on the desk.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at Caltech, has some online lecture videos from a course he teaches each year on the neural basis of consciousness. They're pretty neat, and give a nice overview of visual neuroscience. There's lots of fun stuff about how splitting the brain splits consciousness, experiments which probe at our inner "zombie agents," and so forth.
my kids are 6 and 8 now. I wish I had access to top univeristy lectures when I was in high school. it would have kept me from being bored out of my head by the drivel spoon fed in public school.
I expect that the mass, nearly-free communication from the Internet will significantly shift our assumptions about education and the ages at which people get different levels of training.
Right now, people are kept out of the professional workplace as long as possible and it has been increasing over time (subtle pressures to reduce competition from young people mostly drives this). more degrees, etc mean you are 22-25 ish before you are treated as "acceptible" in the professional workplace. This is completely ABSURD biologically, where one can compete as an adult (strictly biologically) at about age 16-18. Most primiltive humans had "adluthood" rituals even younger.
With widely available content, advanced degrees will mean less - I mean if you can walk into an engineering firm at age 17 and have taken and understood all the MIT classes on structural engineering - OF COURSE they will hire you in a second. They would pay you less maybe than a EE major, but who cares, the 17 yo will do it in a second. This is mirrored in current higher education and funding too. Most professors are more multidisciplinary (belonging to mutliple depts.) and funding is becoming more collaborative (like the NIH roadmap). THe result is lower importance on specific disciplines.
For my own kids, the world will change so much by the time they will be ready for college, I'm not really thinking the same rules will apply to them when they get to be 17 or 18.
We'll see....
ANd who care about doing it via lecture. I always found lectures the least useful parts of college. I learned more being around smart people and having a few years to soak up knowledge from books than I did from lectures.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I partially disagree with you. By going to lectures, I was able to spend the rest of my time reading other materials not covered in lectures or playing StarCraft. I noticed on average it took me twice the amount of time to pick up the materials from the textbooks compared to the same materials presented in the live lectures. But that's just me. Everyone have their own learning style, and for me lectures were very useful part of college.
I agree with you the time to soak up knowledge from books was also very useful. Lectures allow me to spend less time on the materials covered and more time on materials not covered.
Different people learn better in different ways. 5 minutes with a book for me is more valuable than 50 in a lecture- I read and understood the book for my microprocessor design class over christmas break (and designed a simple MIPS processor from home, the final project). It took a year of lectures to cover the same material. So I had a lot more Starcraft time that way. Hasta Zerg! :)
I'm not syaing lectures are useless- I'm saying video lectures only help a subset of learners. I'd rather have an online book and a web forum for questions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Actually, I won ACM member of the year for my work with the tutoring department. I had several tutees claim I was better than the teacher. Half of them thought I was a class TA, I was much easier to find than most of the real TAs.
There remains a problem- the vast majority of lecture time was wasted because of 1 person who was slower on the uptake than the majority of the class. A "no questions" policy is overkill, but by and large any question that takes over 30 seconds to answer and/or has already been covered should be answered by "see me after class". The most common comment most people I've talked to have looking back at college is "I learned more form the books than I did in class". Its not right for 1 or 2 people to significantly reduce the utility of the lecture for the other 30 (or in some cases, 300).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Any free videos from the Barbizon School of Modeling?
Questions should be for forums/usenet/office hours after class, not during lecture.
Assuming a perfect lecturer.
I've had plenty of profs skip important points they 'just knew', forget lines from their notes, and even be completely wrong. It's useful for the class to respectfully engage in these cases.
I understand about the student who completely missed the last 5 minutes for whatever reason, and a good lecturer will know to when to defer that until later. He'll also adapt the lecture based on the questions being asked - sometimes it's clear when clarification/amplification is necessary.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There quite a lot of videos available at MSRI but they are more on the lines of workshops and not university course material.
I'm glad to learn of this blog. The physics professor I work for currently has me working on a project to put his lectures online, so it's very useful to me to see how others do it. I knew about the MIT and Stanford web sites, but I see that this blog catalogues other less well-known math and science online lecture sites.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
If my professors could teach as well as Feynman, I might have stayed awake. To often lectures are a necessary chore for most professors. What engineer|scientist|mathematician hasn't had an incomprehensible lecturer for a tough course? You'd be surprised how many people enjoy learning for its own sake.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....