The ResearchChannel
During our June PCCC Faculty Institute we spent one session showing faculty how to use video clips from the commercial vendor FMG in their writing-intensive courses. Still, in that unpredictable way that workshops sometimes go, there was much more excitement about being able to embed YouTube videos in their web pages. I realized that there was a sizable group of faculty that just hadn't believed that there was good, fre, educational material in YouTube.
Since then I have been compiling a list for a fall workshop of other online video sources that allow easy access for students at no cost.
One of those is a site I first encountered in 2005 when I helped organize NJIT's first Internet2 Day. The ResearchChannel was founded by a consortium of leading research and academic institutions so that researchers could share the work with a public audience. It's available to about 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers, but can also be viewed on their website. That includes 70 university and school-based cable systems in the United States and in other countries.
Of course, avenues of distribution for video have been changing since 2005. Two methods that didn't exist then are now part of the ResearchChannel's ways of getting the research out there. Apple iTunesU now offers their video in its "Beyond the Campus" downloads area. Some of the titles available in their iTunes area are: Dark Energy, or Worse: Was Einstein Wrong?; Bioenergy and Biofuels: An Overview; The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How the Mind Works Unconsciously; The Teen Brain; and Mesopotamia to Iraq: Perspectives on the Middle East.
And, like some other educational institutions, they have their own channel in YouTube which is certainly a way to get to the general public. In fact, this video part of Open Everything also includes efforts like Princeton University's UChannel which also has a YouTube presence, and FORA.TV which offers a wide selection of good video content on its its website, in iTunes or via YouTube.
June ResearchChannel video preview
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