TED Education — Video Lessons For Students

New submitter EuNao writes "TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), the organization based on 'ideas worth sharing,' launched a new initiative this past week. It is called TED-Ed, and it aims to engage students with unforgettable lessons. There are many places in the world where a wonderful teacher or mentor is teaching something mind-blowing, but as it stands now not many people have access to that powerful experience. Ted-Ed aims to bring that engaging experience to everyone who has an internet connection. Here are summaries and links to the nine videos that were initially released."

Comments

3 edu-sites already.

[knuthin]

Three education related sites released this year:

1. Sebastian Thrun's udacity.com
2. A combination of univ initiatives @ coursera.org
3. Ted ed

In addition to the programming initiatives at Khan academy and MIT OCW that existed already.
We have dropouts/people who never went to college holding high positions (work with a bunch of such guys on open source projects) Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?

Re:3 edu-sites already.

[giltwist]

Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?

Simply put, passively watching a video is better than nothing and even better than tuning out in the middle of class. However, there is simply no replacement for hands-on experience. That's why you see all those cutting edge new charter schools that are opening up moving away from textbook-based learning to project-based learning. As a math teacher, I am 100% behind sites like this providing opportunities for people to engage in life-long learning. That being said, I simply don't believe you can become an expert anything simply by watching. The cognitive psychology research says you need something like 10,000 hours of practice to develop the automaticity of an expert. That is to say, do you want the surgeon who has to check the anatomy book before he cuts into you or the surgeon who practiced on cadavers so much he can find the place to cut with his eyes closed? THAT, my friend, is what the value of college is. The other key feature of college is that gives you a chance to see where the holes are in understanding/technology/methodology. Universities, especially at the graduate level, are really about preparing people to engage in innovation. Do some people have good ideas without college? Surely. Are even half of those ideas feasible or attainable without some serious training? I doubt it.

America has only produced a handful of scientists.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, America has only ever produced a very, very small handful of scientists. The "one last generation of scientists" that you speak of is the only generation of scientists that American has produced!

Up until about 1970, essentially every significant "American" scientific discovery of accomplishment was the work of European-born and European-trained scientists and engineers. Working backward from 1970, the space program was mainly the work of Europeans. The atomic age was brought about by Europeans. Much of the digital age, including critical work involving the creation of transistors and semiconductors, was the work of Europeans. Most automotive and aviation technology was pioneered by Europeans. The techniques for building modern urban infrastructure were the work of Europeans. Railways and locomotives were invented by Europeans. The technology of the industrial revolution was the work of Europeans.

I hope you see the trend there. Europeans are responsible for virtually all of the technology available and widely used today.

American scientists only came into their own in the late 1960s and 1970s. Americans like Dennis Ritchie and Donald Knuth, for example, did perform some groundbreaking research. But then the whole Reagan Mistake of the 1980s took place, followed by "free trade", both of which essentially trashed the American economy, and also the funding for scientific discovery and education.

These days, illiteracy runs rampant throughout many parts of the United States. Without having basic reading abilities, it's impossible to learn even the most basic mathematics, and it's impossible to make any kind of a scientific contribution. Indeed, when you hear about American-based scientists today, many of them are from Japan, South Korea, India or China. It's the same situation as it was before the 1970s, except now it's Asian-born and Asian-trained scientists making the real discoveries and performing the real science.

Academic worry

[FrootLoops]

As someone who's likely to end up as a university professor of math in a decade or so, online learning like this makes me wonder about my long-term job security. Why should I get paid to put together and give a lecture on material that an excellent lecturer and support staff have already thoroughly covered online? Sure, there's more to classroom learning than mutely listening to a lecture, but is there enough to justify the extraordinarily high cost of the alternative? Will it be tempting in a few years for a budget-conscious administrator to have undergraduates watch free online lectures with grad students doing all the support work (grading, office hours, recitations, etc.)?

I take some comfort in the fact that people are willing to pay through the nose for a prestigious education and that online education is currently a second-class citizen. Academic institutions are also very slow to change as a rule. My theoretical job is probably safe, but I don't know what the long term future holds. Residential undergraduate institutions stocked with professors giving lectures may become extremely rare as high quality, highly reproducible, efficient online learning improves and perhaps becomes mainstream.

Re:Academic worry

[MisterSquid]

I take some comfort in the fact that people are willing to pay through the nose for a prestigious education and that online education is currently a second-class citizen

I used to be a professor (of American Literature). I am unusual in that I have a wide background which includes mathematics, programming, and skill with computer systems/networks. I love literature, languages, poetry, art, and postmodernity. I also love computers, GREP, web development, and cosmogony (this last strictly as a spectator).

Increasingly, I found academia stultifying, especially because it meant laboring in obscurity for students who were on their way somewhere else. The best students--the graduate students I mentored in their quests to find professorships--were far and few between and headed to either to the dead-end of no-humanities-jobs or the undead-end of low pay and crippling student loans. My colleagues in the math department did not (over)produce as many Ph.D.s as we in English, but their also wallowed in the budget-cut gutter. As academics, we all were getting defunded and lines for new hires were either cancelled or endlessly deferred.

All that aside, when you find yourself saying something like your livelihood depends upon a captive audience "willing to pay through the nose" while the upstart competitor is presently perceived (and sometimes is, but not always) as a "second-class citizen" you've seriously got to wonder what your future holds.

I left academia in 2010 to become an entry-level front-end developer in the Bay Area (mostly to come back to California where I grew up. I'd had enough of living in the Midwest at an R2 university). Right off the bat I made 20% more than I did as a faculty of 7 years. My salary, my environment, my autonomy--all these things have only improved in the last two years. Every day it gets better.

I do miss some aspects of academia, the colleagues and motivated students especially. I also miss unfettered access to a research library. But I don't miss grading, overwork, low pay, and obscurity. There are also things about tech employment I dislike: petty politics, office culture (presentism), boyzone, sexism, homophobia (even in SF), and 50+ hours/week cycle of declining productivity.

Anyhow, this is a long anecdote to warn people like you that academia wears thin for many academics, but academics are so specialized they often have no choice but to stay the course they set many years ago in graduate school. Others of us who have fungible skills (technology) go elsewhere when the romanticized ideal of the university is replaced by the day-to-day of academic life. As someone who fell in love with information technology with his first Apple //e ('e' for education, remember), I saw the writing on the digital wall.

You think your job at some (more likely than not obscure) university will keep-on-keeping-on now that disruptive technology (such as Ted Education, tablet devices, and Stanford's free courses) have ruptured the pristine edifice of the ivory tower?

Think hard and think again because as sure as it will rain, academic jobs are going to be even more severely constrained.

Re:America has only produced a handful of scientis

[Trepidity]

The atomic age was brought about by Europeans.

A more accurate statement might be "by European-born Americans". The atomic age was not brought about in Europe, but only once Europeans from several nations emigrated to the United States, where they worked in a team of diverse ethnic origins (Germans, Hungarians, Americans, Poles, etc.), something that would've been unthinkable in Europe itself.