A while back we posted about the IIT lecture series, here are some of my thoughts for the whole series.First of all many thanks to IIT’s for taking this initiative. Its really great way to expand the knowledge. The efforts and videos are great. The best thing about this courseware is that they are video lectures so I think they are far more helpful than the MIT open source courseware. Yes MIT's breadth is more, but from user point of view watching a lecture and hearing them, doing on board is much more memorable. So this is how I felt while seeing. As someone rightly pointed an hour worth of video was much, better than a whole year of book study. And it’s true. The list as far as AeSI syllabus was concerned, had lot of material. So now AeSI students will have one more additional source of info.
But all is not right with the IIT video lectures; there is room for improvements in terms of presentation...
All the lectures were 50+ minutes long, so watching them on low bandwidth is very slow and hour lecture can stretch to 4 hours and it kills the experience. So I would like these series to be divided in 10mins and linking via play list.
Another drawback i saw in the IIT video lectures was. It was present in almost all lectures but I’ll mention advance strength of materials lecture. It had 39 lectures, dealing with almost all the bachelors’ degree syllabus, but they all are labeled linearly like lecture1 ASM, lecture2 ASM, and so forth. So you see if someone wants to learn about MOHR circle, how he/she will get it? Labeling should be based on topic, so the lectures are easier to find and thus more useful.
These were the two major improvements that I felt that can make this lecture series more useful and easier to find and browse fro the students.
I hope that IIT will take these steps soon. But till then AeSI folks enjoy this treat that IIT has presented. It’s worth goldmine!!!!
