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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."
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...
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....
I can give you links to some very comprehensive Human Anatomy demonstrations...
They're not exactly in a laboratory environment, though.
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