Linking the MIT Physics Lectures into My Online AP Physics Course

One of the changes I'm making in my online AP Physics C course this year, in keeping with my previous blog suggesting that you should try to improve your teaching and/or course each year, is to create links in my course to other related quality content on the Internet.  As a physics student at the college level in the 1960s, I remember seeing a 16 mm film from the The Feynman Lectures on Physics series.  I expect it would have been presented to us in an evening enrichment session rather than used directly in our physics classroom; we didn't spend our physics classes watching movies. 

I had never seen anybody that could talk about physics the way Richard Feynman could. I thoroughly enjoyed watching his films and seeing the additional insights that Feynman could pull out of the topic; insights that I was not getting as I attended class, read the textbook, and did my homework.  His lectures were both helpful and entertaining, and I in no way am I indicating that my college instructors weren't doing an excellent job.  There aren't going to be more than a handful of people in the entire USA that can present the material like Richard Feynman did.

A few years back, MIT adopted the policy that they would make all of their course content freely available on the Internet.  I had made excursions out to their site over the past few years, but I never found quite what I wanted.  Last spring their site came up in a search I was doing and their site seemed better organized than it had been on my previous visits.  So in April I sent an email to my students that there was an MIT lecture on Ampere's Law on the Internet.  Ampere's Law is a rather abstract topic, and I thought the video lecture would be helpful to my students, so I added it and treated it as an enrichment activity.

This year I'm linking the MIT lectures directly into my online Illinois Virtual School AP Physics C course, and now I'll explain why. I had one recalcitrant student from the Chicago area, that I had a heck of a time getting any homework out of and getting him to attend the online screen shares.  Every week for most of the semester I had been sending updates to the student, the parent, and the school indicating that the student had an F going in the class.  I had been told by the student's local school that the student had all kinds of ability, that he was planning on attending MIT, and that he had already been accepted at MIT.  I couldn't have gotten into MIT, but that didn't diminish my willingness to give the F if I didn't receive the work

It turns out that just I was emailing the link to the MIT lecture on Ampere's Law to my students, this student was visiting the MIT campus.  Below is part of the Email exchange I had with this student after I sent the link to the MIT web site.  My April 25 email struck a chord with him!

--------------------------------------------------

From: [Student's name removed]

Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 10:17 AM

To: Tom Anderson

Subject: Re: The MIT Open Course Web site

Hi Mr. Anderson,

You can actually download all the physics lectures through iTunes for free and use it either on the computer or an iPod (and don't have to rely on You Tube). I actually downloaded these already too.

Sincerely,

[Student's name removed]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Tom Anderson  wrote:

Hi Folks,

As I've been searching for some other materials on the Internet this morning, I tracked back further on the MIT web site where I had found the video on Ampere's Law that I sent earlier today.

I have found the videos presented by MIT correspond almost chapter by chapter with what we have studied this year.

--------------------------------------------------

In the next blog I will give the web site that I have been using to get to the MIT Physics lectures, and also talk about how I'm linking them into my online course.  I will also email the student above and see how it is going for him at MIT, I can't guarantee that I will get a response, but I will let you know in the next blog if I get a response.