Open University videos on iTunes U
I've been working for the Open University for a long time now, re-organising their audio-visual archives so that they can be accessed free online through ITunes software, on ITunesU. It's a fantastic resource that hardly anyone seems to know about. Universities all over the world are uploading their visual content in the hope that potential students will be impressed and want to study a given course at that institution. Open University's material is the best of course. There are skillfully put together documentaries on all sorts of subjects (called albums), divided into short chunks or "tracks" . Open iTunesU on your computer and go to the Store. Click on the tab iTunesU and surf from there. Here's an example.
The universities have the content, the videos and web provide the platform, and hey presto, a very useful service.
And here we have a San Francisco based company doing something similar - except, these are only filmed lectures, rather than professionally edited documentaries. Also, they're streamed, so you have to sit through their annoying initial student blurbs about when they've got to hand in their essays etc.
Here's their blurb:
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.
As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.
We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.
We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone.
http://www.academicearth.org/about
and here's an example of a lecture:
http://www.academicearth.org/lectures/sustainable-systems-in-sustainable-living
(Gosh American uni students are pretty rowdy and excitable don't you think!)