TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing

TED-Ed is a nice initiative from TED, where educators and film makers come together to create video lessons explaining or uncovering topics, ranging from philosophy and history to mathematics and technology. Also includes the ability to build lessons, where you can design questions that engage students and groups of learners. This can be done for YouTube videos or TED-Ed original videos.

Best Free Online Classes

This is a list of websites offering free online classes and resources for education and free tutoring:

From Universities

• edX: Online courses from top universities.
• Udacity: a collection of university-level free online courses in Computer Science in Engineering from Stanford professors.
• Coursera: a collection of free university-level online interactive classes from Stanford professors in various subjects including Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, ... etc.
• MIT Open Courseware: freely available course materials from MIT. 
• Lagunita: a collection of online courses from Stanford.
• Stanford Engineering Everywhere: a collection of free engineering courses from Stanford.
• Open Yale Courses: freely available video/audio courses from Yale.

Don't Lecture Me: Teaching through Discussions

An inspiring APM documentary discussing a new method of teaching college students: discussions. The basic idea is that instead of the professor standing in front of the class and lecturing them, she would tell the students to simply discuss the material and ask each other questions about it. The students then begin discussing the material with one another, and since some of them have just understood the new concept begin taught very recently, they are more likely to explain it to those who have trouble getting it right.

The full transcript is available here and the online audio is here and the downlaodable mp3 file is here.

Eric Mazur teaching his class at Harvard. (Photo: Emily Hanford)

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