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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.
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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what format are the video files in the torrent? Also, what resolution, bitrate, and codec?
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."
Glad you asked! Nothing else but the absolute minimum for a teaching videos. The torrent was made to be as small as possible (29 GB) using only the most efficient and smallest video and audio formats possible.
Format: Blu-ray video only. You will need a burner to play the video.
Resolution: 1080p video, 7.1 Dolby DTS audio.
Bitrate: video at 40 Mbit/s and audio at 24.5 Mbit/s.
Codecs are MPEG-4 AVC for video and DTS-HD (Lossless) for audio.
This should answer your specific questions. I must say its spectacular. Its like being in the classroom!
Note: I *might* stand to be corrected. In which case, please direct me to the appropriate Khan academy file(s) in the Torrent.
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.
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.
This is truly great news. But why not go with an open-source platform/project?
Some in .flv, some in .mp4, they're the same as the original ones hosted on youtube.
Could you make this torrent source available any where else? My interest in using torrents is to avoid the block that my country puts on khanacademy.org, but if you torrent is on there too, I can't get to that either.
No left turn unstoned.
I create a new torrent torrent from time to time to include the newest videos and stop seeding the last torrent at the same time, that's why I don't add the torrent anywhere else, you can find the latest torrent in the link in my above comments and talks about it here. If you can't get to it, I'd suggest asking your ISP or your governments why they block it and try to change their decision, or use a proxy to get to it or ask a friend from another country to e-mail you the torrent.
Instead of comparing a weak video, I'll cover one of the topics I feel Khan Academy covers very well: two-tailed vs. one-tailed tests in Stats. Khan Academy gives a great illustration of working through the problem, and tries to touch on the "why", but it doesn't compare to the in-person experience I had.
My experience with it was in an ~300-person lecture hall class. Despite this, the professor took multiple questions, calling on students by name, and reconfigured his approach when he realized where people were having trouble with it. He offered multiple explanations, multiple examples, and then went on to discuss the application to various fields. In Political Science, for instance, there have been issues with cheating, where people realized their results were insignificant with a one-tailed test but could get significant results with two-tailed and subsequently changed their tests to get results. Because of this, two-tailed tests are generally frowned upon.
Khan Academy can't gear the lecture towards a different audience (high school students vs. poli sci majors vs. pre-meds), and they can't adequately address field-specific concerns. By definition, videos can't re-tack and approach a problem in a different way based on feedback.
The videos are an incredible supplement, and they're better than most textbooks, but they absolutely could not replace the professors in 95% of my classes.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
It's one guy though (Khan that is) but he reaches thousands if not millions.
Your professor may be brilliant, but how many can he hope to reach in the same amount of time? 300 per class, 2 classes per semester and 2 semesters per year? 1.2K? ~2K per year?
Why couldn't your professor post a guest video to Khan or youtube? Lesson titled "Professor XYZ from ABC University on two-tailed vs. one-tailed tests on in relation Political Science considerations"? Do the lesson then you could also have a supplementary "Q&A" video of students asking common questions.
With technology these days he could probably hire a few ungrad film students to record, edit and post it for low or no cost.
Education/knowledge is like art. It doesn't do much good locked away were no one can get at it.
I think he was already asking somebody from another country to help him (in fact he asked the source directly) and that person just blew him off with some naive response about changing his government.