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Comments: 40 + -   Indian Tech Universities Put Lectures Online For Free on Thursday May 22 2008, @11:08AM

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 22 2008, @11:08AM
from the happy-music-too dept.
education
science
technology
sas-dot writes "The most sought-after Indian institutions like IIT and IISc have put their course lectures on YouTube. The site is up from last December and is slowly gaining momentum in terms of lectures available online. This is India's own program similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare. Good to see the competition, and that students have many sources of knowledge for free."
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Submission: Indian Instituions youtube lectures by sas-dot (873348)
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Indian Tech Universities Put Lectures Online For Free 40 Comments More /

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  • Now... Will they be indexed... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jellomizer (103300) on Thursday May 22 2008, @11:13AM (#23506766)
    It would be nice if you find the particular lecture you want to refesh information you may have learned. Say for Computer Science go over the lectures on C++ Templates because you haven touched them in about a decade or so, but you found that you need them again. Or somehow use the to help with affordable degrees. Say read the lecures and take a couple of classes to upgrade a BA in Computer Science to a BS for about $200 or so. Or have some placement test to get out of taking some required courses.
    • isn't the difference between a BA and a BS whether or not you've had Calculus? That seemed to be the difference at my school -- I knew a few people who got BS in English... of course, I have a BA in English and it was mostly B.S.
      • No for my school the difference between a BS and a BA in computer science is weither you have taken Formal Languages and Atonoma and an additional upper level math course. As Calculus was required for any degree in computer sciecne.

      • isn't the difference between a BA and a BS whether or not you've had Calculus?

        Depends entirely on your school. Sayeth the wik [wikipedia.org]:

        In the United States, many colleges (particularly what are known as "liberal arts colleges") and universities award the BA for all "academic" subjects (whether it be for English or for Chemistry, for example) -- often these colleges and colleges within universities only offer academic (rather than pre-professional) courses. Schools that have professional training ("Police Science

      • What is the difference, most of the world education is based like that. The United States tends to be more project and skills building based, however there is still a lot of Memorize and regurgertate that is required to pass. But if I got my Degree in Indea or the United states my degree would count the same. Having access to professors lectures would be nice for people who want to learn without the expense. And if colleges can allow them to get some credit for what they learned all the better.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jellomizer (103300)
        Well my University did. As computer science was part of the College of Arts and Sciences. The difference was an extra CS Class required and an extra Math Class. People who took the BA usually did so when they were in a Duel Major program Say Major in Music and Computer Science as not having to take 2 extra classes. Made getting both degrees possible.
      • Well a quick search shows lots of places. Including Yale.

        When I received my BA in computer science (not from Yale) the dividing line was because my first major was mathematics (which could be granted as either a BS or BA -- depending on how much applied math was taken.

      • Re:Now... Will they be indexed... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870) on Thursday May 22 2008, @04:18PM (#23511398) Journal
        At Cambridge (the UK one) you get a BA in *science*. And it's still called Natural Science [wikipedia.org].

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mikael (484)
      Have you tried second hand book stores or campus book sales? With the former, you can books at 10% of the retail price, while with the latter, you can get textbooks for less than 1 pound/dollar each. And they will have everything from architecture to biology, chemistry and zoology.

  • As a student from one of these institutes (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 22 2008, @11:14AM (#23506774)
    I am just happy that some of the lectures are from those exceptional professors who are about to retire.

    Hopefully this will be a lot helpful to those who, like me, miss all the morning classes :)
  • I would consider it to be complimentary, or supplemental. It adds to the knowledge base. The more the merrier. There's no need to "compete", or put down the other. Cooperation, not competition will bring about faster progress in most endeavors.
    • Even if this is seen as a competition, it benifits the students. There is an added benifit that it puts extra pressure on the Professor/Lecturer to actually make the class more interesting and worthwhile because it is open to wider scrutiny. Sort of like Open Source forces you to code properly.

  • Major misread (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Did anyone else read that title as:

    Indiana Tech Universities Put Lectures Online For Free
    I was about to shed a tear of pride for the corn-producing hoosier state ;(

    Did you know that both Orville Redenbacher and John Gotti came from there?
  • I wish they had closed-captioning though. No offense, but the accents combined with poor Youtube/recording audio quality make it really hard to understand what they're saying. It's a shame, because the material covered is pretty good and broad.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I wish they had closed-captioning though. No offense, but the accents combined with poor Youtube/recording audio quality make it really hard to understand what they're saying.

      Also no offense: learn their accent.

      The ones I've watched weren't paced too quickly, and involved a chalk board. Add that you've got pause & rewind, and I really don't think it's that much to ask you to learn an English accent that's a little heavy, but entirely without opaque localisms. It's just differences of pitch and rhythm.

      Yo

      • It still isn't a bad idea to have some subtitles. It's not too hard to add them and would save a lot of inconvenience (going back and forth to exact times in youtube videos is not the easiest). Making the videos more accessible/user-friendly will only widen the audience, which is what they have been put up for in the first place.
  • Professors, teachers, please start recording your lectures and putting them online. It is invaluable for a student to be able to press pause, in order to think over a difficult point, or to rewind to see a difficult argument explained again. It is inefficient for thousands of mediocre teachers to give the same lectures all across the world, year after year. It would be much more efficient for the best teachers to give the lectures once, and for everyone else to watch them on video. Professors/teachers w
      • Do you believe we should abandon lectures entirely, and only use textbooks? If not, my point stands. In some ways, a lecture explanation is more clear than a book explanation. The teacher can point to an expression and say, "now this thing over here looks a lot like this thing over here, and if I just factor out a so and so they will be even more similar..." and things like that. Harder to do that in books. Also, tone of voice can help, for example to know what the professor thinks is hard, what is ea
      • Too ambitious to expect someone to have all three abilities:
        1. understand the stuff well
        2. know how to teach that stuff
        3. know how to act well (drama, plays)

        But, is there a shortage of geniuses?
        I think not.

        Or better still, get Feynman in Second Life to do all the explaining!!
  • I for one am very glad that the IITs and IISc have decided on this path. This is definitely a step in the right direction. I used to watch some of the UGC programs in India when I was in high school. These seem to be better in quality and provides the on-demand access. Would be even better if we could get some rich metadata for these videos (like year, course, very brief summary etc.) This may sound like a "me too" compared to MIT's initiative. There nothing wrong with a me too at all! "Me too" beats "why

  • lectures from the edge of physics (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sweetser (148397) <sweetser@world.std.com> on Thursday May 22 2008, @01:04PM (#23508570) Homepage
    Hello:

    I am a fringe physicist, which I define precisely as someone without an advanced degree in physic yet tries to make a contribution. I know that the majority of people with my background produce (how do we say this politely?) muddled duck dung. Our talks get slotted into the 8am slot at APS meetings, or put on the last day of a long meeting. Such is our station in research.

    The only other folks in the audience are other people giving presentations. Important people are too busy.

    My interest is to find out where I am wrong. If I can establish this, then instead of spending $900 to go to an APS meeting or $3k to go to an international meeting, that money can go into a 60" flat screen fund.

    With YouTube, my talks are on line, http://youtube.com/my_playlists?p=E602756BE43B04E4 [youtube.com]
    I'll be traveling to Brazil to see if I can find someone to puncture my balloon. If you are in Campinas Brazil next Thursday, then my talk is at 5:30 - the next to last day of ICCA 8. If not, I should be putting up the talk within a week.

    Later,
    Doug
  • So do we get to learn Asok's forbidden telekinetic powers?
  • I attended it back in the mid 90's. All they were back then were money grubbers (not much different from today but) were completely blatant about it. There facility was awful and they really had some bad professors. I guess I'll try to get their lectures online to make up for all the money I gave them for nothing.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by junglee_iitk (651040) *
      Oh really? How much did you pay? Because when I studied I paid 20,000 INR per semester (~300 € today - that's RIDICULOUSLY high!1!!) and IITs spent more than that on me.

      See, I am no fan of IITs. My userid here is relic that I could have gotten rid of it, but my Karma is "exceeeeeelent". But before you say they were money grubbers, can you tell me how much do you make today?
        • Wow, I am marked troll while you are the one throwing strawman arguments.

          I have already said that each IIT spends more per student that they take. IITs are formed by central government directives and are heavily subsidized.

          How does it matter how much money he/she makes?

          Here is how it matters: it will tell us if he is a hypocrite, if he is making a shitload of money due to education after spending a very little amount of money on that education, and then is bitching about it.

          Are you implying that its okay fo

  • It's all very nice that everyone now gets to watch lectures on-line for free, but what about the students? If my professors started posting their lectures on-line, I'd be pretty angry. Part of my tuition is for the opportunity to sit in class and listen to these professors give a lecture. So if others are getting this privilege for free, it basically means I'm paying for everyone else in the world to have it.

    If professors feel that they're lectures aren't worth paying for, I expect a sharp decrease in th
    • See http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/ocw.html [mit.edu] to read about how MIT answers your charges in explicit detail. They clearly state that what you're paying for is the interactive experience, the ability to ask and have questions answered, and, oh yeah, the degree. It's from 2001 so you're getting angry 7 years after the fact.

      Personally, I think that if someone has the time, energy, and drive to learn something this way, more power to them.

      I also believe that these lectures are less useful than a book would
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