Videos are easy to produce due to services such as YouTube. I’ve written about several other things you can do with YouTube with mashups. Hopefully some of these new productions are useful for instruction. Here are a few new free sources for instructional videos:
FedFlix – http//www.archive.org/details/FedFlix. Minute someone says educational videos, you can see the hypnotic state they enter understanding online videos are probably pretty boring and dry, let alone those provided by the government. The expense to create videos with any accustomed flair for commercial potential attractions are just not available to enhance production. FedFlix is a rich resource of content provided by PublicResource.org and the NTIS. There are over 3,000 films covering the past 70 years with such topics as WWII to the current space program. Part of the appeal of FedFlx is its list of the most frequently downloaded and most recently added materials. There is some flexibility to embed films on a webpage, online course, blog, or stream directly from the site in a variety of formats. There is a brief description with agency and year the video was produced. There are also links to other film sites available and an RSS feed for newly added content. All films on this site are in the public domain, so there is no question regarding copyright. FedFlix response time is very fast and you can search by title, author, subject or browse the entire film collection. A similar site for over 10,000 educational films is the LearnersTV.com (http://www.learnerstv.com).
LearnersTV.com (http://www.learnerstv.com). As I mentioned previously, educational videos may not be as commercially appealing but provide commercial free resources for lecturers on a wide range of subjects. LearnersTV.com provides over 10,000 lectures on topics of biology, physics, chemistry, computers, medicine, dentistry, nursing, engineering, accounting, management, psychology, history, language, literature, law and more. Videos are produced by a variety of universities, many recorded lectures are intended for course instruction via distance learning programs. Some have better quality production, such as those produced by the Harvard Business Publishing. There are over 400 science animations, lecture notes, and practice tests for medical topics and, using Google based search functions, LearnersTV.com locate items by subject, course and title of lecture. Flash is used for most videos while some use RealPlayer. There is also a feature allowing you to focus only on the video by dimming the rest of the page. People familiar with YouTube may expect to be able to see full screen options. Students will like supplemental explanations for their course work and faculty will find the visualizations useful to illustrate lecture topics. A comparable collection for instructional videos can be found with FedFlix (http://wwwarchive.org/details/FedFlix).
