Compressed video
experiment.
In
the old days, each student had to go in search of his or her own teacher. The
printing press led to mass produced books, which each student could read at their
own pace, reread as needed, etc. This in turn led to the lecture hall, where
one teacher could help many students navigate through the book.
Today,
things are very different again. Youtube has brought
the lecture to the students in their rooms. Lectures can be viewed slowly or
quickly, and replayed as often as needed. Like books.
I am
not looking to deliver the same lecture to thousands instead of hundreds of
students (scaling up as in MOOCs). Rather, I think that this technology should
be used to improve our teaching of the same class sizes we already have.
NPTEL
and other efforts have provided free lectures online. Many of these lectures
are slow. You can watch them once, but not many times.
I
think compressed video lectures can be prepared which are hard to follow at
first (requiring pauses), but which are good for quick revision later.
Something like 2 to 3 hours worth of classroom lecture delivered in about 30
minutes after eliminating various pauses and other inefficiencies. I have tried
this out for a vibrations class I am teaching. Many students have liked it.
Here
are some of the videos. Apologies for the poor picture quality in some of the
earlier ones, and technical errors as and where they have crept in. Thanks to Mahima Mishra for recording,
editing, and putting together the videos.
1. Elementary review of ordinary
differential equations, here.
2. Elementary calculus of
variations, here.
3. Lagranges equations and analytical
dynamics, here. (Poor
image quality: apologies. It gets better in later videos.)
4. Multi-degree-of-freedom
vibrations, here.
5. Single-degree-of-freedom
vibrations, here.
6. Vibrations of Euler-Bernoulli
beams, here.
7. Elementary review of the
Laplace transform, here. (I am
trying to get rid of the hiss in the audio. I have an imperfect solution.)
8. Elementary root locus plots, here.