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Free Online Video Education from Top Universities 43

Posted by timothy from the fill-your-giant-brain-with-stuff dept.
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."
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Free Online Video Education from Top Universities More

Free Online Video Education from Top Universities

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  • I generally frown on slashdot submissions of "check out my blog!" but the topic is valid. Why not link to some usefull info directly rather than submitters blog?

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Well there is alot of stuff in there. It's not like slashdot could link to everything he does in one of it's post. Besides it's not a 'blog' as in 'weblog' or 'online diary' or even a homepage. it's a clearly focused website with a specific theme that aggrigates internet resources (like slashdot), it just happens to use a blog engine. Infact it seems to avoid the 'lets just talk about whatever the fuck is on our mind' danger even more than slashdot by only linking to videos.
  • Does anyone know of any good Human Physiology lectures online? I have a contract with a professor to read and learn the material over the summer independently, and was wondering if there were any free lectures available.
  • Oh come on teach! Algebra? I'll never use that...
    • What I find amusing is that students have probably been saying that as long as there has been institutionalized education, and then some, yet teachers still FUCKING SUCK at coming up with real-world examples. Or at least, all my teachers did. Well, that, or they were too arrogant to put out the effort, or field my question as anything other than me trying to be a pain in the ass. I believe that all math classes should deal with concrete examples of how you would actually use the math. It's useless if you ca

  • Missing In-Class Learning (Score:5, Informative)

    by neonprimetime ( 528653 ) on Monday June 26, 2006 @02:41PM (#15607386)
    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.
    • Perhaps people that either don't want to pay to attend a class, or just want to hear one particular lecture rather than take an entire class would find these helpful. I don't think anyone is claiming these non-credit lectures can actually replace taking classes.
      • Most universities allow contact through e-mail, chat or forum/BBS. So you can easily as questions if you miss something. Also, wheres the rewind button in a real class. How about when you are studying and need a refresh? This is a very viable alternative to first and second year courses. Most questions are asked during tutorial anyways. In high grades however class sizes drop alot and being in person is more effective even if isn't as cost effective.
    • I'm currently piloting a video podcasting experiment at our school, primarily for our distance learning students. We've told instructors that their videos should be about 10-15 minutes in lenght and cover a few main concepts, and that these videos should be supplemental to the course, so that they enhance the learning experience, but not be used as a substitute for actual lectures. So far, the student response has been largely positive.

    • Re:Missing In-Class Learning (Score:5, Informative)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Monday June 26, 2006 @04:37PM (#15608355)
      AMusingly enough, the interrupt the prof part is why I hated lectures- due to questions they always crawled at the speed of the slowest learner. If you were smarter than average (and even in college I was) so much of the time was taken up explaning the same point I got 5 minutes ago that I wanted to smash something. Especially in low level courses where the people who didn't belong in the program weren't weeded out yet. Questions should be for forums/usenet/office hours after class, not during lecture.
      • Yeah, I can definately relate.. I have ADD too, so when redundant questions start cropping up, it's hard for me to keep paying attention.

        On the flip side, I've seen teachers/professors completely skip over things inadvertantly, and it's to the detriment of the class if nobody speaks up. Also some professors just do a terrible job of explaining things.

        All things considered, I think encouraging questions is probably the lesser of two evils, and the curricula of most classes factors in some amount of time for
      • Questions should be for forums/usenet/office hours after class, not during lecture.

        Assuming a perfect lecturer.

        I've had plenty of profs skip important points they 'just knew', forget lines from their notes, and even be completely wrong. It's useful for the class to respectfully engage in these cases.

        I understand about the student who completely missed the last 5 minutes for whatever reason, and a good lecturer will know to when to defer that until later. He'll also adapt the lecture based on the questions

  • Why a blog? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday June 26, 2006 @02:46PM (#15607427) Journal
    This is a very useful resource, but I don't understand why a blog format is a reasonable way to present it! Why not just update a vanilla web page?

    The Berkeley CS61 lectures are available as free podcasts on iTMS, by the way.

  • Interesting concept, but I don't think those are credit courses. I'd like to take the entirety of college via something like this, or an over-the-web curriculum. Instead, I wait for something like Wikiversity [wikibooks.org], and perhaps other projects. I helped build this Internet instead of going to college. I'd like to get a some kind of diploma for it -- use the Internet to complete the rest of my education. Wikipedia has been a great non-credit way to make up for my some of my lack of schooling.

    • Re:Interesting concept (Score:3, Informative)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 )
      Too bad Wikiversity is basicly dead. THe board took a look at a vote where over 2/3 supported creating it, then said "No online courses". Not just no accredited courses (which would be pretty impossible), but no teaching or courses at all. This was followed by the entire movement being co-opted by a bunch of people wanting to turn it into a place for researchers to congregate. Combined with a small subset of wikibookians who just want to see it die because it might take contributors from wikibooks. Rig
      • They're similarly gutting Wikibooks- Jimbo just came in one day and said anything that isn't a textbook for a college or high school course had to go. All the guides, how-tos, and anything that wasn't in the strictest sense academic. Both resources are being horribly mismanaged by the wikimedia board.

        When I visited wikibooks for the first and last time, I was completely turned off by the absolutely laughable and bizarre topics of the books (and the fact that most of them seemed to have been started as wishe
  • For a compilation for links, I'd rather check a list compiled by a group of people instead of a single blog. A specialized blog may contain links of higher quality over all, but a dynamically-updated list maintained by a large group of users will be updated more often and may contain a larger variety of links. For example, here are del.icio.us links for video+course [del.icio.us] and online+course [del.icio.us] tags.

  • Not the full experience.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Monday June 26, 2006 @03:26PM (#15607782) Homepage Journal
    For the full college course experience, one could watch these while suffering a hangover, playing Solitaire, holding three or four different conversations via text message or IM, and doodling on the desk.

  • Neuroscience/Consciousness lectures (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Monday June 26, 2006 @03:26PM (#15607784) Journal
    Christof Koch [wikipedia.org], a neuroscientist at Caltech, has some online lecture videos [caltech.edu] 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.

  • awesome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drDugan ( 219551 ) on Monday June 26, 2006 @03:42PM (#15607915) Homepage
    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....

    • Bear in mind, however, that if 17-year-olds could be trusted to do EE work, established employees will view them as a threat to their job security... Nothing'll please everyone.
  • Any free videos from the Barbizon School of Modeling?
  • There quite a lot of videos available at MSRI [msri.org] but they are more on the lines of workshops and not university course material.
  • I'm glad to learn of this blog. The physics professor I work for currently has me working on a project to put his lectures online, so it's very useful to me to see how others do it. I knew about the MIT and Stanford web sites, but I see that this blog catalogues other less well-known math and science online lecture sites.
  • I am mostly focusing on physics, mathematics and computer science video lectures.
    Good man.

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