A new company called Academic Earth offers free online videos of lectures from some of the world’s most renowned scholars teaching at leading universities. The company has simply grabbed the videos off the universities’ own Web sites and plans to offer tools to students who want to talk about the content — along with a chance to grade the quality of the lectures.
With just a cursory glance of the site, I was impressed with the content and user experience. These are entire courses, not just a handful of lectures. Academic Earth is easy to navigate, and gives you several viewing tools to enhance your viewing of the lectures.
Currently, there are six schools with content: Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Princeton. The videos are hosted on the blip tv website under the Creative Commons License.
This is a great opportunity to look in on an actual lecture, and get a feel for the instructor. You can even embed the videos into your own site:
I will be presenting a workshop for the Education Service Center Region XV entitled, “This is…PowerPoint Jeopardy! Creating Interactive Learning Modules”. One of the outcomes of the session is that teachers will have a completed review module in which to use in their classes.
I am a firm believer in keeping the learning dialogue going, even after the face-to-face training is over. Many times I have participated in a great day of training and networking, only to lose track of the facilitator and other participants. Exchanging e-mail addresses is okay, but it does not truly create a collaborative atmosphere.
So, I set out to figure out how to provide a shared learning environment for the teachers who would be giving me a day’s worth of their time and effort. I looked at various discussion board tools, groupware, blogs, wikis, etc. Nothing stood out as a way to get everything in one place that was easily managed. Then, I met Moodle.
Moodle is a nice tool to create online learning opportunities in structured and open-ended ways. And, my hosting service Siteground includes a tool called Fantastico, which installs it in about three minutes.
Long story short, I have created a Moodle course for participants to upload their completed projects into a searchable database. This will allow other participants the opportunity to use these review modules with their classes. Hopefully, it will be a valuable tool.
However, this video should not discourage you from utilizing all the great features in PowerPoint for your students. Check out my workshop for more details.
