Video is KING in distance education

With the field of Distance Education exploding due to the maturation of the Internet, it’s no wonder more good quality free academic content is finding its way on the web. Here’s a great example that I just learned about from Dr. James Harris at the University of Leeds in England. It’s called The Faculties and it contains video snipits of senior-level highschool (or junior-level university) lectures spanning several fields including Biology, Chemistry, English, History, Math, and Psychology. To date, they have produced over 360 videos with a promise of more to follow. If you are not in the business of distance education this repository remains useful. Instructors can request downloads of the videos so that they can be played for students even in classrooms that are not wired for the Internet.

This semester I am teaching a second year chemistry course via distance and I have some students in the class that have asked me if I could provide links to some useful videos on specific topics. Naturally, I am always on the lookout for them so I was very excited to learn about The Faculties. I’ve watched about a dozen videos so far and they are very good. There is definitively something for everyone in this repository and you can stay up-to-date on the progress in building this repository via Twitter (@thefaculties). Have a look at some of the videos and let us know what you think. Do you know of other similar free video repositories other than the standard YouTube search? If so, let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Free Academic Videos for Everyone

It's new and it is in a 'beta' state; however, Academic Earth is something to keep your eyes on. Currently, it offers thousands of post-secondary lectures from authorative sources - all free. The creators of this repository have worked hard to integrate features into it that make it extra useful. Each lecture has a side bar with a slection of special options, such as a download to iPod option, a citation option, an 'embed' option that gives you code you can copy and paste into your website (this means that you can distribute the video to your students without having to host the video on your server. Nice!). Each lecture is rated by registered users of the website (registration is free!). So over time, the most highly rated lecture will float to the top. While in the 'beta' state, Academic Earth strongly encourages users to leave feedback on any bugs you find as well as to make suggestions on how to improve the service. At the time of launching, it is billed as "Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars." Not bad for a start, where will it be a year from now! What do you think?

Photo credit: Here.

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