Walter Lewin Articles

Katie Hafner reports on the growing trend of academic institutions putting courseware online. A few key college professors--like our client Walter Lewin--have began posting video lectures, syllabuses, and reading materials for free, helping to "dislodge higher education from its brick-and-mortar moorings." 

Hafner writes:

The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.

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If the mission of the university is the creation of knowledge (via research)...

From the 2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates: Online Learning:

"The foundation has made a few grants to drive online learning, but we are just at the start of this work. So far technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning. With the escalating costs of education, an advance here would be very timely.

Most of us have had a teacher whose lectures made a subject seem fascinating even though we didn’t expect that it would be. If you are going to take the time to listen to a lecture, you should hear it from the very best. Now that finding and watching videos is a standard part of the Internet experience, we can put great teachers’ lectures online.

A number of universities are already putting lectures online for free....

The MIT Muses surprise serenade for MIT Physics Professor Walter Lewin:

A compilation video of Walter Lewin's "Best Lines":

College Too Expensive? Try YouTube

By AP/JAKE COYLE
April 9, 2009; Time

 

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT OpenCourseWare with the plan to make virtually all the school's courses available for free online.

As a visitor, one almost feels like you've somehow sneaked through a firewall. There's no registration and within a minute, you can be watching Prof. Walter Lewin demonstrate the physics of a pendulum by being one himself. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Last December, MIT announced that OCW had been visited by more than 50 million people worldwide. But why would institutions that charges a huge price for admission give away their primary product?

Ben Hubbard, program manager of the webcast project for the University of California, Berkeley, believes it has always been a part of a university's...

MIT professor and YouTube star Walter Lewin's FOR THE LOVE OF PHYSICS, written with Warren Goldstein, which will tell how the author grew up during and after World War II, how he became a scientist, and how he fell in love -- first with physics and then with the craft of teaching physics to students, to Emily Loose at Free Press, in a major deal, in a pre-empt, by Wendy Strothman of The Strothman Agency (World).