A recent article in the Boston Globe summarized an interesting project call Khan Academy (also see the Ted Talk about it here). It started off as a uncle helping his nephew out with math homework by making short YouTube videos of various math concepts. Now it has grown into a huge library of short videos on topics in math, science, and humanities. The list of 100 chemistry videos is impressive. Videos seem to be around 10min long, some teaching topics and others showing example problems.
What I love about this idea is the ability for a student to view exactly the topic they want to learn about, whenever they want to view it, and stop/start/rewind/pause their way through it. This is similar to online courses that have lecture video for the students to view, but these are short and organized by topic. I’d love to see an experiment where the same course was taught with online videos, with online videos and a lecture, and just lecture with no videos. I wonder how much the students would use the videos in conjunction with other support. Either way this is a cool resource that is free for anyone to use.
EDIT: Cool video of a google hangout with Khan.
UPDATE (7/12/2012) The trouble with Khan Academy.