Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Video resource

Remember the old Annenberg media telecourses? While many companies will charge for DVDs or just let the old dated material die and never update it or move it to DVD, Annenberg has a site that streams their material for free.

I use portions of Art of the Western World in my own Art Appreciation course.

Anyway I checked today and they have a 12 episode series on Exploring the World of Music for college students. A quick survey tells me that these are about 30 minutes long and they cover the elements of music (timbre, melody, texture) themes and more, most of it seems to be non-Western and traditional (Western folk) sources.
http://www.learner.org/resources/series105.html?pop=yes&pid=1237

Some of the other college level subjects include: US History, Western Civilization, Geography, Ethics, Psychology, Physical Sciences, and the cinema. Sections on literature and statistics (batting averages, anyone?) could be enlightening too.

Happily these are not just old telecourse series digitized for online use, but some newer updated ones as well.

By the way, I don't use this material until the second half of the course, but I remind the students to check out the links well beforehand, to prevent the "I can't get it to work and the assignment is due tonight" complaints.

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