I think The TC does a very good job; they send me emails with my local cultural events such as lectures, museum exhibits, book signings, etc. plus free essays and downloads on various topics. The local university has non-credit courses of this nature but they are several hundred dollars. $69.95 is reasonable, they are cleanly produced and the professors’ credentials are top-notch. (I think Wolfson does a good job too, btw.) The TC also asks for a lot of feedback on every aspect of their material including catalogue design.

I don’t mean to be tacky, but I’m curious what the professors get out of it – are you allowed to talk about that? Do you get royalties when people purchase your DVD set? Just curious how it works. I’d love to buy more of these when funds allow – I’m sure yours is great since you are apparently “relaxed, eloquent, wryly funny and brimming with ideas…”

And what would a course be, without student commentary?

And TomC: I feel confident in answering your question with a firm “Yes.”

“I’d give particularly high marks to Berkeley for putting course lectures online…”

Where did you find these? I could only find their colloquia and UCTV.

13.

19. Was Einstein Right?

About what?

Not wearing socks?

About what?

What’s so bad about streaming video? I prefer it to having to download a whole file. After all, in real life I don’t go to the same lecture twice, and real life doesn’t even have a pause button.

Streaming hasn’t hurt Youtube’s popularity or usefulness.

Re (1): Clearly there is no accounting for taste so we may well disagree on whether we like the feel of the PI site, and how we rate its functionality. I like it, and find it extremely useful, as it allows me to find specific conference taks given by specific people easily. That’s exactly what I want from such a site.

Re (2): I know that some areas of law are very broad, transcending the actually laws themselves. Other areas focus on specific laws in great detail. There is a reason that passing the New York bar does not qualify you to practice law in the UK.

Re (3):

Would you, personally, someone who listens to talks from PI, listen to talks from Vega?

Yes, and I’ll go you one further. As someone who has given one of the talks stored on the PI site, I have watched all 4 of Richard Feynman’s talks. I am to young to have seen him talk live, so finding the Vega site made me very happy.

I resent your assertion that this means I must have too much time on my hands. I own a copy of all three volumes of the Feynman lectures (the books), despite the fact that they are aimed at a different audience and expect that many other physicist do too. Watching the lectures on Vega is the video equivalent of owning the books.

(2) To assume that the study of Law is the study of specific laws is a remarkably limited viewpoint. For your own sake you should listen to a few talks by law faculty at different organizations. You can go through life mouthing the ridiculous platitudes `oi polloi state about lawyers and the law (simultaneously bemoaning the ignorance of the voting public) or you can invest a few hours in getting a feeling for the reality of law.
To the extent that an astronomer, a physicist and a chemist all have a common appreciation of the world based in natural science, so too there is a common world view in law. You may or may not agree with it, but you really should acquaint yourself with it.

(3) Regarding Vega. Would you, personally, someone who listens to talks from PI, listen to talks from Vega? If so, you clearly have far too much free time.
And if you wouldn’t listen to them, why recommend them? The biggest problem of our time is not finding generic stuff, it’s finding the good stuff, the stuff appropriate to a specific situation. What makes google a better search engine than Alta Vista is that Google (to put it simply) provides me with FEWER references (ideally all I care about is the first page of them) than Alta Vista.
(Not to mention that Vega, like PI, doesn’t have downloads and has a lousy, non-temporal organization.)

The Vega Trust talks are certainly public outreach, but I wouldn’t call them unsophisticated.

The only talks I tend to watch online are science talks, which is why my examples are in that area.

Law talks, as in you example, are less useful in different countries, as laws can differ quite drastically. Science is one discipline that truly universal in that it is identical, no matter where you live.

There probably are examples from lots of other disciplines, as I say, I only pay attention to the scientific talks.

So as regards scientific video content, you might want to check out Nature, MPG, CERN and DESY.

The Vega science trust in the UK also has a wide array of very interesting talks and lectures available online, including 4 Feynmann lectures: http://vega.org.uk/

——————

You didn’t read my post very carefully, did you?
Vega is of zero interest to me. I’m not going to say whether or not it performs a valuable service; I’ll simply point out that it almost everything there is targetted at about a high school level and is thus not what I am interested in.

Perimeter’s web site is garbage, and this is a widely shared opinion. Among other flaws, the talks are only streaming, no downloads. They are not organized in chronological order and there is no RSS feed (let alone a podcast), so it’s impossible to know what’s been added since the last time you visisted.

Finally I would point out that the world is larger than science. My post was a general statement about sophisticated talks, not about science, let alone physics talks.
It doesn’t much matter whether you listen to talks about cosmology hosted at MIT or the University of Beijing. The point about the source matters rather more when what you are listening to is talks about politics, law, or business (and even something like history). If the bulk of the lectures one’s population can easily download on the subject of law or business come from America, you can hardly be surprised when one’s next generation see the world, for better or worse, as structured according to the implicit assumptions of American law and business.