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I watched his thermodynamics videos and was quite impressed. It's actually difficult to find approachable course material in that topic, but he thoroughly expla
by korch 16y ago
I watched his thermodynamics videos and was quite impressed. It's actually difficult to find approachable course material in that topic, but he thoroughly explains it, all the way down to Boltzmann's H-theorem. How one guy manages to cover all this material is incredible—he's going to become the Max Headroom of Internet education!
And it sounds like his plans for the future are ambitious: can you imagine the day when every lesson from an entire K-12 + 4 college years of education can be watched on Youtube? Just fast-forward or rewind to wherever you are and learn at your own pace.
It's also a clever inversion to achieve an optimization we programmers can appreciate. If students are basically learning 90% identical content, then instead of every student having a separate teacher, just record one really, really exceptional teacher covering everything, and all students use that teacher. I guess this means the world needs a lot fewer teachers, but everything gets balanced, so those teaching resources could be applied to more complicated lessons that cannot be learned rote from video recordings. The incredible end result being basic education levels are lifted for everyone. Now that's a plan!
- bluesmoon 16y agoWe used to do this (record instructors teaching) at my previous company, however the videos were only available to registered (paid) students. Making education freely available to everyone was the style of early Greek philosophers. Then the sophists came along. They were a group of educators who travelled around and would only teach those who paid for it. It's a pity (albeit unsurprising) that this was the pattern that survived.
- elai 16y agoI think those teachers would become more tutors and evaluators.