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BitTorrent and Khan Academy To Distribute Education
drDugan writes "BitTorrent, Inc. announced this morning that they have launched a partnership with the Khan Academy to distribute open education videos. They launched with more than 2,000 videos, covering high school and college level curriculum, across science, math, history, finance and test prep. All of the videos are free to download and open licensed with Creative Commons."
KHAAAAAAN!
that bittorrent can be used for legit purposes. Hopefully as a side benifit, this will make it harder for the MPAA crowd to villify these types of file sharing networks.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
So why do we have all these highly intelligent expensive professors wasting their time standing in front of hundreds of students in a lecture hall reciting their teaching script like a human video projector? Let the best lecturers in the country make videos and let the students send in questions and assemble a frequently asked questions list and then put those professors to work doing research for the benefit of humanity.
Awsome I can get Music, Porn , games and online classes all from thepiratebay now!! MY IQ is going on the up and up now. lol
I already made a torrent file of 29 gigs of all the videos, it can be found in "Other Video Sources" here.
Block BT traffic and be branded as anti-education!
I am only a lowly IT technician. But I think I may be able to put a word in with the science faculty. Teachers like to show the occasional video in class to shut the children up while they get some marking done.
At a time when so many things are wrong in this world, Khan Academy is helping countless people improve their lives through education. The help of BitTorrent brings this to even more people. Truly awesome and many thanks!
This guy is really good at explaining complex subjects. I've watched quite a few of his videos.
. Seriously, even though I personally Torrent the shit outta every copyrighted work I can get my hands on, I'm glad it is developing legitimate uses to shut up the **AA's.
With all the scrutiny that file sharing providers are under these days, it's a good idea for someone like BT to immerse themselves and become associated with something legitimate like this. Hopefully it will make some judge later down the line think twice before having them shut down for illegal sharing.
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Couldn't pass up the opportunity. Maybe I should watch these videos, be enlightened, and not inclined to such pedantry...
Anyway,I'm pleased that this kind of thing is happening openly and over a torrent network. Apple's tried to engage this kind of thing with iTunes Edu (or whatever it is) but I found the execution to be lousy, as you never know when that video's going to be yanked/expire/work on your device.
The open-ness of this is going to be useful.I hope anyway.
KHAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!
The world is how you make it
As of posting, there are 45 comments. 5 of them are "KHAAAN" jokes. 11% of the comments are literally the same lazy joke. FFS Slashdot, get some originality.
I was inspired by Khan Academy to launch my first ever open source project. It replicates a little math tool Khan used to demonstrate slope-intercept in his videos, it's called eGraph. It also allows people to design, print, or project graphs in a classroom and it has a nice demo featuring the slope-intercept equation. When I saw the equation "animated" while changing the variables it instantly sunk in. During that time I was already building eGraph to design and print custom graph sheets, so I added the slope demo and released it for free. Its also a great little project for someone to learn the "meat" of several important java libraries (including Java2D - printing) and Netbeans (the source comes as a Netbeans project). http://www.datavirtue.com/egraph.html
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I don't have a lot of spare free time to sit down and watch the videos. I would LOVE it if Khan Academy would release the lessons as understandable lecture/ audio podcasts as well. This way one could just listen to the material instead of needing the visual cues as well. I understand a lot of the subject matter can't be easily explained without visual cues, but right now if you where to just take the audio from the videos...you'd be lost as to what's going on. Podcasts please, not just a release of the youtube videos.
No teacher worth a damn is just reading a script, even when they're teaching a class of 1000,,,
When I give a lecture, the students are feeding me information at the same time I'm feeding them. When I see a class filled with gray hair, I know I can get away with a Jerry Garcia reference. That won't work if I'm looking at kids wearing t-shirts from the latest Disney TV show. Am I getting silence because I have the class in rapt attention, or is it just the lull before the snoring starts? Are the frowns and forehead creases because they have no idea what I'm talking about or because I just tried to reference Charles Darwin in Dallas?
The difference between watching a video of a class and actually being in a classroom is the difference between watching porn and actually having sex.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I feel like some comments are missing the point. I think Khan Academy works best in conjunction with some kind of normal curriculum. Repetitio Est Mater Studiorum as the saying goes. Khan Academy provides a way to hear the same thing in a voice different from one's instructor. It also solves the general problem of losing concentration during a lecture, and not being able to adequately replay the concept in a derivative way as opposed to the way many textbooks explain concepts that build on other concepts.
While it can also be the basis for independent learning, there is something to be said for having a source textbook of problems with an index for easy look-up. Perhaps this is an opportunity for textbook marketers to link up with Khan Academy as well as a way to develop their teacher's manuals for lesson planning, or maybe one of the many open/free science textbooks out there to really make a positive push in these budget limited times. The bittorrent angle just gives an official torrent distribution methodology that does not depend or get limited by YouTube, and therefore really allows for penetration to areas that may not have reliable internet, but want some high quality instructional videos (read poor areas with spotty internet and low budgets)
Quick Bias Disclaimer: The site has been invaluable to me as I have recently decided to take a bunch of pre-med classes and take the MCAT. I am an attorney with BS in CompSci, but I had not taken any science courses in 6 years. It helps to reacquaint yourself with old mathematical friends you haven't had to use in a while, and it is easy to cherry pick cross product and dot product videos, or review how to use matrices to solve multi-variable problems without a calculator.
Why stream it on demand, if you can download it ahead of time, effectively having a local cache that will not lose its educational value in five or likely even ten years?
When the subject is art appreciation, a Free textbook can teach only about works whose authors died before January 1, 1941. Anything newer, and the copyright owners of the works discussed in the textbook will demand phone-home DRM.
English is a proper noun and should be capitalized accordingly.
Usually, yes. But "english" is lowercase when you're teaching someone how to play billiards.
At MIT, there is a similar project called BLOSSOMS. One would hope that these types of programs would be able to find common ground to get positive network effects.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Also, there's nothing more boring in the world than watching a canned lecture.
That sounds to me like you're claiming that noninteractive TV is boring. Yet in fact, it isn't boring to the majority, or it wouldn't draw advertisers. It's all in the presentation: see Beakman, Bill Nye, or anything on Discovery Networks.
The Khan Academy has produced the FINEST Academic Courses on line for HIgh School and College Curriculums that are FREE. There is no reason why students of All Ages, young and older can not get a REAL Education Superior to the Junk taught in most seondary schools and many Colleges. This is going to be a NEW AMERICAN EDUCATION REVOLUTION.
This is truly great news. But why not go with an open-source platform/project?
I installed the application on my torrent client. But, aside from the 'History' category, I was disappointed at the lack of videos related to non-scientific subjects.
I know that I stand apart from most of the Slashdot crowd on this one, but I would be interested in some language classes; I'm a linguist by trade.
Our kids could all have a world-class education if we'd only put Classroom Spectaculars in every K-12 school.
Read topic #4 of www.ideasforourfuture.com
Stop the boredom, get kids TURNED ON to learning.
give an example
You can use the same process for other 'utorrent apps'
- Get the app from http://www.utorrent.com/apps
- Unzip and have a look at libs/*.js
- It seems that there's some of js/json work there, so playing around with the urls gives me:
Playlists: http://bittorrent.cloudant.com/khan-academy/_design/playlists/_view/category?group_level=1
video previews?: http://bittorrent.cloudant.com/khan-academy/_design//videos/_view/views?descending=true&limit=5
torrents:) http://bittorrent.cloudant.com/khan-academy/_design//playlists/_view/title
You may use a bit of python json to parse the torrents json page
Or, for people under 30, there's Two Kirks, a Khan, and a Pizza Place.
Since I can't see the video from outside the USA, my daughter said,"Oh, the video is just for dumb people."
It's easier to learn when you have feedback, someone rewarding you for doing well and punishing you for doing bad. Would anyone get better at playing a game if they neither won nor lost? The Khan academy has a great advantage in the context of mass education: It removes the influence of negative peer pressure. It's great disadvantage is that it doesn't provide a reward system.
Stuff is free for a reason, it is poor quality junk.
BitTorrent cannot guarantee integrity and authorship. Anybody can modify free content and re-upload it as trash and deception. Pity the children.
Only paid content can guarantee quality. Nothing's free. * cough, Economics, cough *. Put that in your Education pipe and smoke it.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Under President Hutchins,(ABOUT 1932) the Univ Chicago had 4 reqired core courses, HUMANITIES, SOCIAL SCIENCE, BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. BRILLIANT LECTURERS LECTURED TO ABOUT 500-800 STUDENTS, 4 DAYS PER WEEK. COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS WERE GIVEN AT THE END OF THE ACADEMIC YEAR. ONE EXAM, THOSE CORE COURSES WERE ONE HELL OF AN EDUCATION
NOW NEARLY 80 YEARS LATER YOU CAN HEAR BRILLIANT LECTURERS EDUCATE YOU AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GO TO THE UNIV OF CHICAGO
PS IN 1934 TUITION AT UNIV CHICAGO WAS $300/YEAR.
HAPPY ALUNNUS OF UC