CWRU quicktime movies of physics homework

Hal Abelson (hal@martigny.ai.mit.edu)
Wed, 2 Nov 94 15:19:58 -0500

I was at Case Western this week as part of an ABET accreditation
visit. Case has invested heavily in a campus-wide network.

One of the projects that cought my eye is in the physics department,
where they make made videos of TAs at the board going through the
homework problems. These are then digitized and put on a server. You
can download these and show them with MPEG viewers. I saw one running
on a Mac. The quality isn't great, but it's acceptable.

The value of this is that students can view them whenever they want,
and can easily repeat segments of the explanation.

The reason that this is interesting is that the production costs are
minimal -- just a matter of someone pointing a video camera. It's the
kind of incremental activity that doesn't require much money or
organization. Whether the educational value of this is more that one
would get form just writing up the solutions, I'll leave for you to
judge.

You can look at this by connecting to Case's web page
http://www.cwru/edu

and then looking through academic departments till you find the
physics department and the course:

PHYS 123

at the URL gopher://gopher.cwru.edu/11/class/mans/phys.notes.phys123

You can view the movies if you have an appropriate application (e.g.,
MPEG play) hooked to your Web browser. (Don't try this from home,
boys and girls, since the files are each about 10 Meg).

Another ting that Case does, by the way, is maintain a univeristy
service that digitizes instructors' notes and puts these up on a
server. If you browse through the Case web pages, you'll see a lot of
digitized notes.

-- Hal