An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the proliferating videos by college professors at YouTube, and the move of colleges and universities toward setting up their own official YouTube channels. The article begins:
Forget Lonelygirl15, YouTube’s 2006 online video phenom. Professors are the latest YouTube stars. The popularity of their appearances on YouTube and other video-sharing sites may end up opening up the classroom and making teaching—which once took place behind closed doors—a more public art.
What’s more, Web video opens a new form of public intellectualism to scholars looking to participate in an increasingly visual culture.
The creation and offering openly online of individual videos is a promising network natural contrast to the e-learning format that has thus far dominated higher education over the Internet years. The standard e-learning model has been thought of as a course, with a curriculum, lessons, resources and instruction. Those sorts of hierarchical content repositionings from the books and paper past are forced and awkward in the online network setting. A piece of a professor’s teaching offered on a video is, by contrast, a perfect node of pedagogy for the open network that is the Internet.
On January 29, The Wired Campus updated this report with more examples.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I’ve been exploring various ways of making open educational content – like the UCB youtube videos – available via a protable grazr widget.
There’s a short write up and demo of an embeddable UCB video lecture browser and search widget at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012375.html
regards
tony