Why are you re-inventing the wheel? Use these education videos!

Almost every day something comes across your Twitter feed which is a golden nugget. A perfect little resource, tool or story that can help you in your practice of being an educator. However, once in awhile you hit the mother lode. Such is the case today with a blog called Open Culture: the best free cultural & educational media on the web. I was compelled to visit the site with their recent posting entitled 125 Science Videos: Our Greatest Hits. Wow – it’s a very appropriately titled post. There’s some great free videos on this list that touch on subjects relating to Astronomy, Space Travel, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Neuroscience, etc. Some of these videos could be used to augment a distance learning class or they could be shown directly in a face-to-face classroom setting. I took the opportunity to view a few of them. Some particularly interesting ones from my perspective were the Physics of the Bike, the Periodic Table of Videos project, and of course the very funny bit that Technology is Awesome but Nobody is Happy.

There’s a lot more interesting posts on this great Open Culture blog. So quit making plans to re-inventing the wheel by mounting your own video production company. Instead take the time to peruse all these free media objects. There will certainly be some appropriate ones for almost any course topic.

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eLearning – do we know what the heck we are doing? Are we in a rut?

Trent Batson, executive director of The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning, has just published a thought provoking article in Campus Technology (dated 19 Jan 2011). As a practitioner in the field of eLearning I read Trent’s article with great interest. Many of the points he touched upon really rang true to me. For example, he writes: “The shift in education is away from learning autonomously to learning collaboratively.” This statement applies broadly to education and I feel it is important to highlight this concept in an eLearning and distance education context. When I am a member of a Course Development Team that develops web-enabled courses, too often I slip into the rut of placing the academic content first in my priority list while placing student-to-student collaborating and interaction as a much lower priority. Why do I do this? I think there are several reasons:

1. It’s easier (and faster) to put together content then it is to put together meaningful student-to-student collaboration experiences. Content is easily sourced with the maturation of the Internet and professors do not have unlimited amounts of time to devote to course development activities.


2. Most professors have more experience putting together content than designing meaningful student-to-student collaboration experiences. Professors are content experts and many lack the specialized training in educational design.


3. Some members of academic departments still believe that content is king! The perception exists that allocating some student energy towards collaboration only decreases the amount of time they have to spend learning the content and that this is a non-desirable effect. Some of these same people believe that teaching and learning is exclusively about lectures and textbooks. Some of those same professors build assessment schemes that test only a student's ability to regurgitate content. In the end what does the degree mean? That the student is good at memorizing? Does the workplace need the majority of staff to be good at memorizing?


4. There is some student push-back to collaboration and interaction especially at a distance. Many provide the all too familiar complaints such as “it’s too hard”, “I hate group work”, etc. Well – being a productive person in the workplace REQUIRES interaction and group work with other staff (some of which are not geographically co-located). So despite being perceived as “difficult or hard”, collaboration is a required skill to master early in all disciplines.

Reading articles, like Trent’s, help situate and realign myself better in the big picture of education. Have a look his article and let us know if any points ring true to you. Leave a comment below

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