Paul Bloom’s, highly recommended Intro to Psychology course is available to watch for free online. He is a very engaging and interesting lecturer. Even if you can’t get into Yale, you can still attend class or at least experience lecture by watching the 20 video lectures from this course. You may not be able to ask questions or take the exams but you can do the assigned reading from Peter Gray’s Psychology (5th Edition).

YouTube recently made available a new channel on their site called YouTube EDU. The channel is the result of work by Google employees using their time to make academic content from universities on the popular video site more easily available. The videos are further separated by school. Popular school channels include Harvard Business School, the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, Purdue University and UC Berkeley. The academic relevance of each school’s channel varies, but the amount of academic content is tremendous.

The lecture topics run the gamut from guitar lessons to anthropology lectures to an MIT course on quantum physics. For viewers seeking out lectures on specific topics, YouTube EDU provides a search utility that filters out non-educational content. Many of the lectures are full hour-length classes on film. The UC Berkeley channel offers up an hour and a half guest lecture by the Dalai Lama among 600 other videos.

Lectures have been posted on YouTube for years, but several YouTube EDU university channels have grouped together lectures to create entire courses. Yale University’s channel boasts 13 full courses, each with 20 to 25 hour-long videos. Offering full courses in easy-to-use chronological order undercuts the fractured nature of making single lectures available out of context. YouTube EDU offers over 200 of these full courses.

A similar site was launched recently called Academic Earth. It also provides free video lectures from top schools across the nation. While watching these videos is not quite the same as being in the classroom or engaging in discussion, the sheer amount of quality education available for free is a landmark achievement and attests to the value of technology in education.

Here is one of the more popular lectures series on YouTube titled “Physics for Future Presidents”:

The book Brain Rules discusses how what we know from brain science can be applied in the classroom. It describes the University of Bologna, one of the first western style universities which was established in the 11th century. The science lab involved a mixture of astrology, religion, and dead animals, yet the classroom was remarkably familiar to today’s classroom. The standard 11th century Bologna classroom included a lectern surrounded by chairs, which begs the question – could it be time for a change?

A recent post at Open Education suggests a student-centered classroom instead of the traditional teacher-centered classroom.

As we move towards greater use of technology within education, there is a push away from the traditional, teacher-centered classroom to one that is student-centered. While offering some very interesting potential for teachers, one element that appears to be taken for granted as we seek to make a student-centered classroom work is the need for a motivated learner.

One of the most significant criticisms leveled against teacher-centered classrooms is that such an environment actually fosters a level of student passivity over time. The belief is that using more of a “guide on the side” or a discovery-learning approach featuring essential question formats would be far superior to our current practice of a set curricula driving classroom instruction.

That belief is founded in great part on the notion that curiosity is an innate characteristic in children. Therefore, in teacher preparation programs, the focus should be on developing a teaching arsenal that unleashes this fundamental human trait.

Such a belief has lead to a discussion that we should replace traditional pedagogical or “child-leading” teaching strategies with andragogical or “man-leading” approaches. The shift is seen as moving away from “taught” education to learning that is self-directed.

But as we noted earlier, such a shift is dependent upon a certain level of motivation from the learner as well as the notion that curiosity is innate.

If students were given a more active role in the classroom, I think it would make for a much more effective education system. The challenge is how to tap into the innate curiosity and desire to learn, which may be the “holy grail” of education.