Many college students have discovered the benefits of using online videos as supplementary course material. The popularity of online lessons available on Khan Academy through YouTube has spread across campuses, so students should be excited to learn that the popular TED organization has now joined the movement in free online education.
As reported in a recent Washington Post article, TED’s new TED-Ed channel on YouTube is their effort to provide free, engaging online video lessons for high school and college students.
TED talks available at Ted.com have been very popular across the world, including on college campuses; however, these new TED-Ed videos will be slightly different from the typical TED talk video in order to be more captivating and informative. The videos combine some of the best educators’ narration of a lesson with vivid animation to supplement the lecture.
There are currently 22 videos on the YouTube channel, broken up into 5 playlists such as “How Things Work,” “Inventions that Shaped History,” and “Questions No One (Yet) Knows the Answers To.”
The videos currently available on the channel are shorter than other video lessons such as the popular Khan Academy videos. They are also not based on specific course subject matter. Therefore, these video lessons are not meant to correspond to a course curriculum. Instead, they are meant to excite students about learning outside of the classroom.
Check out the most recent video uploaded to the channel below introducing and explaining the purpose of the new channel:
