Monday, January 14, 2013

TED- ED Allows Teachers Create MOOC like Flip Lectures using Youtube Videos


Khanacademy is essentially a one man in the form of Sal Khan producing lecture videos and encouraging ‘flipping the classroom’. There has been controversy about Khanacademy essentially being an ‘online chalk and talk’ system although I’ve also defended the benefits of ‘flipping the classroom’.  Now however, TED has come up with a brilliant open alternative to create free lecture videos with an ability to flip. I believe TED-ED’s ability to allow professors create customized MOOC like flip lectures using the freely available Youtube videos will unleash much needed creativity and critical thinking components into the education system. Given below are some of the powerful features on TED-ED-
Turning Youtube into an Educational Video Resource
YouTube holds a rich trove of videos that could be used in the classroom. However so far, it’s been challenging to transform these videos into a truly interactive part of a lesson. TED- Ed’s  new platform hopes to solve this problem—by organizing educational videos and letting professors “flip” them to enhance their lectures.

Instructors don’t have to rely only on TED’s educational videos to make their lessons. A special tool can flip any video on YouTube, adding sections to a lesson page where professors can write free-form questions and create links to other resources.
Powerful New Features on TED- ED
The TED-Ed site is both a portal for finding education videos and a tool for flipping them.
Theme View- On one page, videos are organized by themes, such as the pursuit of happiness and inventions that shaped history.
Category View- Instructors who want to use videos that are directly related to the subjects they teach can visit another page, where videos are organized in more traditional categories such as the arts and health.
Pre-Made Flip Questions- TED’s videos are displayed on lesson pages that include multiple-choice quizzes, open-ended questions, and links to more information about the material.
Customise Flip Questions - Professors who don’t want to rely on the pre-made content can press a button to flip the videos and customize some of the questions.
Unique Video Link- With each flipped video, professors receive a unique Web link that they can use to distribute the lesson to students and track their answers.
Logan Smalley, TED-Ed’s director, says that instructors could flip viral videos of cats if they wanted to, he said. He said his group wanted to leave the possibilities of flipped videos up to the people building the lessons.
“We didn’t want to limit what people might want to use to teach,” he said. Designers have also provided a way for users to flag any published lesson that they feel is inappropriate.
The New Teaching manifesto project I’ve created aims to bring the benefits of the much wanted Multiple Intelligences and Bloom’s Taxonomy led creativity and critical thinking skils into the classroom.

I strongly believe that the TED-ED approach to learning has the potential to become an even bigger game changer than Khanacademy and could even challenge the dominance of the ‘Celebrity Professor’ led popularity of MOOC’s.

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