07 September 2011

Democratising OpenCourseWare

OpenCourseWare - putting texts and videos of educational lectures online for anyone to download, use and often build on - is a great idea.  But it's still a case of knowledge being handed down from on high by the university priesthood.  What about if anyone could upload lectures they have attended?

Enter LectureLeaks.org:


Welcome to LectureLeaks.org, your personal OpenCourseWare repository. You can now record, save, and upload your college lectures directly from your iPhone or Android device. You can also browse our library of recordings and learn any time, anywhere.

We believe that higher education should be available to all, for the good of society. Anybody who wants to learn should be able to, so we're trying to develop technology which allows that.


Begin recording by pressing Record during all of your lectures, then upload them to us so we can share them with the rest of the world.


Before sharing any recordings, we encourage you to ask your instructor's permission. We are affirmative for open access education, but we also maintain full compliance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.


All recordings are released under the Creative-Commons Attribution license, and our server doesn't record any personally identifying information like IP addresses.
LectureLeaks is a 100% Free and Open Source Project, and uses technology produced by the OpenWatch Project.


Only you can spread knowledge from the privileged few to curious minds everywhere, one lecture at a time.
Fab idea.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well I get the idea but I'm not too sure of the utility - one of their uploads is an audio recording of a talk about biological imaging methods and I can't help feeling the images would be fairly essential to the process.

There is however a bit of a lack of a "Sourceforge for University Lecturers" generally though - I've been looking for somewhere to host University lectures and haven't yet found a suitable location.

Glyn Moody said...

@grantingham: well, it's a start; as you say, a sourceforge for lecturers might be a good further development