Thursday, May 22, 2008

More free courses online

It looks like some Indian universities are following along in the style of MIT's Open Courseware by placing lecture videos up on Youtube. Another project like this is great news however you look at it- the world can always use more education, especially for people who otherwise might have a hard time finding it. Couple this with something like the OLPC project (assuming they can ever get Flash video to run on one) and you have a way for people who might never have access to any form of higher ed to at least begin to learn a bit.

I'll be very interested to see how this works with copyright- having been to a bunch of the MIT talks at various conferences, the folks running OCW will admit that copyright is one of their biggest hassles- they have to clear every image, bit of video, etc. For some image heavy courses such as architecture, this means 900+ clearances for a single course. Since the universities are broadcasting their own lectures rather than putting up all of the course materials, much of this is avoided, but I suspect that a) copyrighted stuff will sneak in and b) that nobody anywhere will care.

No comments: