Freely Available Complete Highly Polished Video Physics Courses

Despite recent great technological advances, lecture preparation remains a time-consuming task, performed in isolation with only the help of a textbook. Fortunately, technology now allows for the possibility of exciting video lectures with full-color images, animations, and movies. Unfortunately, creating such lectures is even more time-consuming, so it is rarely done. However, once created, high-quality, appealing, exciting, even fully narrated lectures can easily be shared, significantly reducing teacher preparation time and vastly increasing the quality and excitement of the lectures.

So, for the past two decades, I have been developing highly polished, full-color, complete, fully narrated courses of PowerPoint lectures for college-level physics courses, complete with pictures, movies, animations, and derivations (of which, Optics and Modern Physics are fully, essentially professionally narrated). And I freely distribute these entire courses (at frog.gatech.edu). They are fully self-contained and completely replace live lectures. Students watch them at their leisure (for a flipped classroom), or the videos can be played in class, pausing occasionally for discussion. Either way, the effort required by the teacher is minimal, and, I believe, the result is a vast improvement over the traditional chalk-and-talk, talking-head lecture.

My hope is that they would serve as a template for a philanthropically funded effort to do the same for all high-school and low-level college courses.