ResearchBuzz

Looking for educational podcasts? Check out Ed-Cast.org , a site devoted to listing podcasts related to higher education.

Podcasts are searchable by keyword. Further, you can limit your search by format (audio or video) and by length (0-15 minutes, 15-30 minutes, etc.) There’s also a “Show All” button, which I recommend using as there’s a limited number of podcasts available that I could find (about 40.) Search results are presented in a table that includes title, category (format, presentation, interview, etc.), length, keywords, authors, and date of submission.

Click on the title of the podcast and get a page of detail, including abstract, Creative Commons license, and contact information. Doesn’t look like any of the podcasts are hosted on Ed-Cast.

There’s an RSS feed available for the latest podcast submissions; look beneath the search form for the icon. A great idea and what podcasts I found seemed to be high-quality, but it would be great to see more here.

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Thanks to reader KM who sent me a note about a site called the OER Commons. The OER (Open Educational Resources) Common is a database of open source content related to education. It’s available at http://www.oercommons.org/ .

Usually sites like this are devoted either to K-12 or higher education resources — this one has both. From the front page you can browse by tag, subject matter, or grade level. Or if you like you can try a fill-in-the-blank advanced search that allows you to choose several different search options. I started by doing a little tag browsing, for art.

Most of the search results I got were for MIT OpenCourseWare, but there were a couple other sources in there as well. Search results include abstract, subject, source, and rating (not all courses are rated). Courses also have a detail page that gives a fuller version of the abstract, the ratings, and pointers to the kinds of materials available. (I didn’t find the ratings very extensive or useful.) It looks like the materials are not kept on the site; instead offsite links are given. If you’re registered with the site (registration is free) you’ll also have the option to tag and rate resources, add some notes, or save searches.

I did a search for podcast and got two very different results: Institute of Industrial Relations 60th Anniversary Program and Introduction to Macroeconomics: Key Macro Variables and Relationships (podcast only) from the course Macroeconomic Analysis. A search for lecture found under 250 results, including the intriguing 101 Things You Can Do the First Three Weeks of Class. If you’re interested in the spectrum of available courses, search for material types instead of subjects.

In addition to the database of materials, this site also has several link lists related to OER content, including articles and reports, tools and technology, and blogs and wikis. Lots of exploring to do here.

The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it is making more than 250 hours of educational content free via Google Video. The collected materials have their own URL at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html. This page is divided into several categories including Courses, Arts & Humanities, and Science & Technology. Several videos are spotlighted on the front page, including a course called “Physics for Future Presidents” and the “China-U.S. Climate Change Forum.”

My eye was caught by “Information Systems 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business” in the courses section, so I clicked on that title. I got a list of six videos for that course. Of course since it was, you know, an educational course that is presented in a prepared sequence, Google Video sorted the available videos by date. No, I tell a lie, Google sorted them by title. Argh. (You can sort content by date, title, and relevance.) Anyway, content here included a 40-minute talk from Sergey Brin, a discussion from Yahoo’s Dr. Daniel Rose about user interface challenges for search, and looks at Web spam and search advertising. Google Video apparently has the capacity for comments now. I was expecting to see zillions of comments for the Sergey video and there weren’t any. Surprising.

According to Berkeley’s press release, there will be more content added over time, so watch this collection. Now if we could only get the course contents default-sorted by date…