Internet as classroom
With just a personal computer and the recurring price of a broadband internet connection you can sit in on a vast number of lectures by scholars from MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, or Yale (though you won’t get course credit for doing so). With the videos and course materials made available by these schools FOR FREE over the internet, given enough time and motivation anyone can attend an Ivy League school – virtually. Even if sitting through 14 hours of Calculus lectures isn’t your idea of a good time, there are a vast number of excellent one-off lectures available on a whole range of topics, most by noted scientists in their fields. I watched a great talk about the current status of solar energy technologies the other night, and another one recently on the science of aging. College lectures and talks are not the kind of thing you will find anywhere among the 140 or so typical channels of garbage on television – but they are out there on the internet, for instant on-demand viewing for inquisitive folks.
For students having problems in a given course of study, being able to access a series of lectures by another professor on that topic is a fantastic resource – no approach can reach everyone equally, and having someone else explain a concept is sometimes all you need to “get it”. The videos can be paused and replayed as desired (something that is not usually an option to a student unless they are meticulous enough to record all the lectures they attend). For older folks who wish they could have attended college or graduates that wish they could return for more coursework – the internet provides a compelling solution. Professionals in education can not only brush up on the latest work happening in their chosen field, but can hone their own skills by watching and evaluating what works and what doesn’t in presentation and classroom dialogue. For those who just love to learn it appears that nearly all barriers have been removed!
A list of some free resources for online lectures and courses are given below. If you know of any more, please comment and let me know about them!
Comment posted on 6-16-2009
I had heard about these but didn’t track them down, thanks for pointing them out (I’m interested in the solar tech one as well, I wrote up a squidoo page on dye solar cell tech).
Comment posted on 6-16-2009
I’ve updated the story with a link to the talk on solar energy I watched. It was very much a talk given for laypeople, but clearly the speaker has a good grasp on the current technologies involved and where solar energy stands today as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.