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Indian Tech Universities Put Lectures Online For Free
sas-dot writes "The most sought-after Indian institutions like IIT and IISc have put their course lectures on YouTube. The site is up from last December and is slowly gaining momentum in terms of lectures available online. This is India's own program similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare. Good to see the competition, and that students have many sources of knowledge for free."
It would be nice if you find the particular lecture you want to refesh information you may have learned. Say for Computer Science go over the lectures on C++ Templates because you haven touched them in about a decade or so, but you found that you need them again. Or somehow use the to help with affordable degrees. Say read the lecures and take a couple of classes to upgrade a BA in Computer Science to a BS for about $200 or so. Or have some placement test to get out of taking some required courses.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I am just happy that some of the lectures are from those exceptional professors who are about to retire.
:)
Hopefully this will be a lot helpful to those who, like me, miss all the morning classes
They don't have course notes and homeworks. But I think the fact that they are putting these lectures up is good - atleast the teachers will have to study these correctly
is that people who I know educated in india have mainly been taught to memorize.
I would consider it to be complimentary, or supplemental. It adds to the knowledge base. The more the merrier. There's no need to "compete", or put down the other. Cooperation, not competition will bring about faster progress in most endeavors.
What?
Did you know that both Orville Redenbacher and John Gotti came from there?
I wish they had closed-captioning though. No offense, but the accents combined with poor Youtube/recording audio quality make it really hard to understand what they're saying. It's a shame, because the material covered is pretty good and broad.
Professors, teachers, please start recording your lectures and putting them online. It is invaluable for a student to be able to press pause, in order to think over a difficult point, or to rewind to see a difficult argument explained again. It is inefficient for thousands of mediocre teachers to give the same lectures all across the world, year after year. It would be much more efficient for the best teachers to give the lectures once, and for everyone else to watch them on video. Professors/teachers would then have much more time for their greatest contribution--answering questions, providing feedback on work, and mentoring students. With video lectures, those words and explanations you prepared so carefully are not simply lost forever the moment you deliver them. A lecture series can now be a lasting contribution to society, like a great novel or great textbook. This makes it much more worthwhile and provides more motivation to prepare excellent lectures, at those times when you do give lectures. If only the Feynman Lectures on Physics had been videotaped and we could see them on youtube...
I for one am very glad that the IITs and IISc have decided on this path. This is definitely a step in the right direction. I used to watch some of the UGC programs in India when I was in high school. These seem to be better in quality and provides the on-demand access. Would be even better if we could get some rich metadata for these videos (like year, course, very brief summary etc.) This may sound like a "me too" compared to MIT's initiative. There nothing wrong with a me too at all! "Me too" beats "why should I" any day.
Hello:
I am a fringe physicist, which I define precisely as someone without an advanced degree in physic yet tries to make a contribution. I know that the majority of people with my background produce (how do we say this politely?) muddled duck dung. Our talks get slotted into the 8am slot at APS meetings, or put on the last day of a long meeting. Such is our station in research.
The only other folks in the audience are other people giving presentations. Important people are too busy.
My interest is to find out where I am wrong. If I can establish this, then instead of spending $900 to go to an APS meeting or $3k to go to an international meeting, that money can go into a 60" flat screen fund.
With YouTube, my talks are on line, http://youtube.com/my_playlists?p=E602756BE43B04E4
I'll be traveling to Brazil to see if I can find someone to puncture my balloon. If you are in Campinas Brazil next Thursday, then my talk is at 5:30 - the next to last day of ICCA 8. If not, I should be putting up the talk within a week.
Later,
Doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
If we are only talking about degrees, you may be right. But when it comes to education, Indian universities do suck - take it from somebody who committed 4 of potentially most productive years to the blackhole of Indian IT school.
Now I don't have firsthand experience of a US school, but from my visits to campuses, from the experience of my wife and my friends here, I can tell you that Indian schools can't even think of providing such a conductive environment for learning.
yes, a degree is a degree. But good learning will shine within one year in real job versus just a degree.
So do we get to learn Asok's forbidden telekinetic powers?
I attended it back in the mid 90's. All they were back then were money grubbers (not much different from today but) were completely blatant about it. There facility was awful and they really had some bad professors. I guess I'll try to get their lectures online to make up for all the money I gave them for nothing.
Too ambitious to expect someone to have all three abilities:
1. understand the stuff well
2. know how to teach that stuff
3. know how to act well (drama, plays)
But, is there a shortage of geniuses?
I think not.
Or better still, get Feynman in Second Life to do all the explaining!!
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
It's all very nice that everyone now gets to watch lectures on-line for free, but what about the students? If my professors started posting their lectures on-line, I'd be pretty angry. Part of my tuition is for the opportunity to sit in class and listen to these professors give a lecture. So if others are getting this privilege for free, it basically means I'm paying for everyone else in the world to have it.
If professors feel that they're lectures aren't worth paying for, I expect a sharp decrease in the cost of tuition next year. But then again, knowing the school, they'll probably just say "Oh, well while the cost of the lectures dropped, the cost of printing the tests just went up. So really you still owe us more money".