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.

 

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