New York University plans to join the growing movement to publish academic material online as free, open courseware. But in addition to giving away content—something other colleges have done—NYU plans a more ambitious experiment. The university wants to explore ways to reprogram the roles of professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction.
This fall NYU will start publishing free online videos for every lecture in as many as 10 courses. They include classes on New York City history, the biology of the human body, introductory sociology, and statistics.
Previous open-courseware projects tended to be text-based, with content like syllabi and lecture notes. NYU’s site would expand the online library of academic videos available to the general public.
What’s more unusual, though, is the vision to build souped-up versions of the material for NYU students only. Freed from the copyright restrictions of publishing on the open Web, these video courses would have live links to sources discussed by professors in passing, as well as pop-up definitions and interactive quizzes.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
What’s interesting about this is it almost assumes that the lectures being taught have been taught repetitively, many times before. While this is true, some of the better classes I took at Stanford (a) changed material quickly to reflect the world around them, and (b) changed a little bit every semester as they iterated to find the “best” way to teach the material. Even classes that had been taught for a while were in need of iteration, which was definitely interesting.
