There is so much exciting going on at P2PU, that if I hadn’t been moving tomorrow, and if my MA thesis was not due in a week, I could have written many long posts. For now, I wanted to make a quick list of all the new courses – there is an official course listing page, but it’s a bit unwieldy at the moment (we’re working on it). So far there are 30 amazing courses offered, more than twice of what we had during the last cycle. In addition to the 18 “normal” courses, we also have 12 courses that are part of the exciting new School of Webcraft initiative, in collaboration with Mozilla Foundation.

Below I have listed all the new courses, with the title, and a tweet-sized introduction.

Adopting Open Textbooks
Can adopting open educational resources make education more accessible to learners and empower educators to share?

Athletics: Our Food For Life
The course focuses on athletics as a platform for improved health, skill development, physiological & psychological athletic efficiency

Collaborative Lesson Planning
Can publishing and collaboratively building lesson plans online make them better?

Consciousness: Games and Apps
Hypothesis: Internet use changes consciousness. How can we develop games and apps that change consciousness faster, and enhance evolution?

Copyright 4 Educators AUS
A course for educators in Australia who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.

Copyright 4 Educators US
A course for educators in the US who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.

Copyright 4 Educators ZA
A course for educators in South Africa who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.

Creative Programming 2010
Welcome to the fun side of computer programming, a powerful tool for creativity

DIY Math
This course is designed to build independent study and peer-support skills for mathematics learners at all levels.

Human Trafficking
Different manifestations of trafficking in human beings with a special emphasis on trafficked women and children through real life examples.

Inteligência Coletiva e AVA
Como potencializar a inteligência coletiva em ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem

Introduction To Finance
This course will cover basic finance and economic topics.

Managing Election Campaigns
How to Win An Election with $2.00 and a pint of Cooking Oil

Open Creative Nonfiction
To what extent is it possible to capture the self in narrative? How do physical spaces affect that story?

Open Governance
How can open communities of volunteers like P2PU make good decisions and get stuff done?

Open Journalism & the Open Web
Can hacks and hackers work together in the new online news world?

Social Innovation in Education
What are your innate “megaskills” for social innovation in education?

The Praxis of Queer Pedagogy
Looking to find ways to rethink your practice as an educator? Find out what “queer” and “pedagogy” have to offer you.

Webcraft courses

Beginning Python Webservices
Want to learn about the protocol that runs the web HTTP and how to make web services with Python?

Designers Tackling the Web
You’re a smokin’ designer… but web pages, how do they work? Tackle the Web. Learn basic HTML and CSS

Drupal Social Web Application
Learn to use Drupal to build a social web app that lets users collaborate on projects and ideas.

HTML5
Is HTML5 more than “just HTML” and can I actually use it to create a website today?

Programming Visual Media
Can you learn to code the same way you learned to paint? Intro to programming, studio-style.

Reading Code
Get comfortable reading other peoples’ code, from big open source projects to small standalone apps.

Scripting 101
Web Monkeys or command line junkies, join, learn to hack and make a better world!

UX: Design para a Educação
Queres aprender a desenvolver ambientes de experiência de usuário a serem aplicados a vários sistemas?

UX: Designing for Education
Are you motivated to develop user experience designs that can be applied to various systems?

Web 200: Anatomy of a Request
What happens when you click go in the browser? Find out in “Web 200: Anatomy of a Request”

Web Accessibility
Maximize your audience through inclusion and non-discrimination by using accessible design.

Web Development 101
How are webpages made and have you ever wondered how to create your own?

Stian

The untiring Stephen Downes has a new course coming up, “Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010″. This topic interests me a great deal, and is also something I will probably be visiting in my PhD program, which I will begin in a few weeks. If this were a traditional course, I would not be able to commit to a specific schedule of readings, contributions etc. However, with a connectivist course, you take what you need, and give what you can (or feel like), and popping in and out of the course is not frowned upon. I did sign up for the EdFutures course, and although I was quite unable to follow all the discussions, I still got some very interesting insights (and made one important new contact) from the experience, so it was absolutely worth it. I have also signed up for this course, and look forward to the discussions that will happen.

Stian

Recently there was a discussion on a P2PU mailing list about the basic model of P2PU, questioning why we didn’t embrace more open-ended networked learning where anyone could teach anything, and whether the word “university” was compatible with the concept of Peer2Peer. Since these two questions have come up frequently in other fora, I decided to post my response on my blog as well.

First about the word university: University does not come from “universe”, it actually comes from “society”, see this etymology:

c.1300, “institution of higher learning,” also “body of persons constituting a university,” from Anglo-Fr. université, O.Fr. universitei (13c.), from M.L. universitatem (nom. universitas), in L.L. “corporation, society,” from L., “the whole, aggregate,” from universus “whole, entire” (see universe). In the academic sense, a shortening of universitas magistrorum et scholarium “community of masters and scholars;” superseded studium as the word for this.

(I remember learning about this in my class on the history of higher education as well – it would actually make for a great P2PU course; examining different models for higher education, from the shuyuan in ancient China, Taxila in India and the nizamiyyaa in old Persia, through to Bologna and Paris universities, the German and French models, the first modern research university in the US, etc).

In that sense, I believe we are absolutely a university. Indeed, there are also many historical models of the university, for example in Bologna the students hired and paid the teachers. See this snippet from Wikipedia:

Universities were generally structured along three types, depending on who paid the teachers. The first type was in Bologna, where students hired and paid for the teachers. The second type was in Paris, where teachers were paid by the church. Oxford and Cambridge were predominantly supported by the crown and the state, a fact which helped them survive the Dissolution of the Monasteries  in 1538 and the subsequent removal of all the principal Catholic  institutions in England. These structural differences created other characteristics. At the Bologna university the students ran everything — a fact that often put teachers under great pressure and disadvantage. In Paris, teachers ran the school; thus Paris became the premiere spot for teachers from all over Europe. Also, in Paris the main subject matter was theology, so control of the qualifications awarded was in the hands of an external authority – the Chancellor of the diocese. In Bologna, where students chose more secular studies, the main subject was law.

Then about how “structured” we should be, and which model we should follow:
This is a debate we’ve had from the very beginning, whether we should be a “free-for-all” platform, letting people start whatever courses they wanted, or whether we should be a quality-controlled platform where courses adhered to specific requirements, and followed certain templates. Initially, most of the founders had a pretty clear vision for a platform built on quality courses, and were not inspired by the idea of another “free-for-all” site. However, it’s very crucial here to note that P2PU does not claim to represent the entire sphere of open education, nor do we want to – we want there to be a vibrant ecology of open educational resources, and open education projects, using lot’s of different approaches, governing models, funding models (for-profits can also play an important part, like EduFire), pedagogical models, software platforms, etc.

So rather than trying to cover all the possibilities, we would like to do something where there is a gap, something that we believe a lot of people are looking for, and something which we can do well. To my mind, there are many alternatives if you are looking for a free-for-all platform. You could start with Wikiversity, for example. Then you have unclasses, and countless other platforms for matching teachers and students. Or you could just start something on your blog, write something on twitter with a hashtag, and see if anybody are interested. There is some great innovation going on here, and we would love to collaborate with all these other projects.

But P2PU isn’t Wikiversity, it isn’t the Massive Open Online Courses that Siemens, Downes, and Cormier (amongst others) have been running, it isn’t the for pay video-based courses at EduFire, … It fills its own niche. One which I think is very valuable. Personally most of my learning is of the “networked” kind. I tweet, I blog, I find resources, I connect with people. But if I want to read up on the Russian revolution, and would like to do that with a co-hort of people that I can discuss with, if I want a reading list that makes sense, and is only linked to openly available resources – there aren’t currently any other organizations out there (that I know of) that are likely to offer that as a free online course, other than P2PU. (There are also important strengths of small structures courses, compared to never-ending networked interaction, I discuss some of my thoughts on this in a presentation.)

And I think that having such a specific model (although we are very open to experimentation and improvement) is a huge benefit when we go out and talk to people, whether it’s giving general talks, or approaching other organizations for discussions on collaboration. So yes, our vision is fairly specific, and it contains the value “quality”. Because when I go to a lot of these platforms, I am often impressed by their vision and their ideas, but then I begin clicking around in the course catalogue, and it’s very hit-and-miss. Lot’s of courses that might never start, others where the course might run out in the sand after a class or two. Whereas if we at P2PU say we will offer 13 courses at a given date, people should know that they are all offered by people who are serious about running the classes, the curricula are all solid, etc. (Of course, some courses end up better than others, and we are working on that!).

Finally though, I do agree that it would be great to gradually crowd-source the way we achieve these results, because obviously, if we want 100 or 500 courses per semester, we are not going to be able to have the core team approve them manually. We’ve talked about different options, having community members “vouch” for a course, having a course automatically get offered if a certain number sign up, etc. I am sure we will see more discussion and experimentation with that. But I for one think that our goal, and our model, is still the right one for P2PU, as one small (but hopefully important!) player in the open ed landscape.

Stian

I really enjoy giving presentations and talks. They are a great way for me to think through my ideas, and systematize them, and I can trace some of my ideas now through a series of talk as they were gradually developed (with help from the audience). I try to be an interesting and engaging speaker (although I can always improve), and I usually spend quite a lot of time thinking through what I want to say, designing the slides, etc.

Ever since I gave my first public talk at Indian Institute of Public Administration, I’ve recorded my talks. Usually just using Audacity on my MacBook, with the built in microphone. Sometimes the talks have also been video-recorded, or there are even fancy systems that try to capture the slides and video together (although these systems are often fickle, and can fail completely). I began putting my slides on SlideShare early on, and have really enjoyed the exposure that website has given me. (All my presentations on SlideShare).

SlideShare offers one very neat feature called SlideCasting. You can upload or link to an MP3 of the talk, and use a syncing tool to have slides automatically progress at the right time during your talk. In that way, someone visiting the site can simply press play, and listen to the talk, with the slides advancing at the right time. Or they can jump straight to a certain slide, and hear what I said about that slide. It’s a great concept, and most of my presentations use this feature. I try to not overload my slides with text, so if you just see them without hearing what I said, the presentation looses much of its value.

There are some issues with the SlideCasting feature however. It takes a lot of time to edit a one hour presentation, with maybe 150 slides. It’s also very difficult to put slides close together, so if you rapidly progress through a set of slides (less than 5 seconds on each), it becomes difficult. I’ve also had some issues where I lost all the timings, or the timings came out of sync.

I wish SlideShare let me download a text file containing all the timings for a presentation I uploaded. Or import a file in the same format. This would have several benefits. Firstly, I would feel much safer that I can get my data out (I spend a lot of time creating timings, but if SlideShare ever goes under, or I want to move to another hosting site, I loose the timings. If I have the file, there is no guarantee that the other site will accept them, but it’s at least a possibility). It’s also a backup in case the timings disappear. And finally, it opens for creating tools that would for example record all my timings when I give my presentation, so that I could directly import these and save a lot of time.

I was just preparing my latest presentation, when I ran into a lot of problems. First, it turned out that the MP3 hadn’t uploaded completely, it ended five minutes before it should. I only realized this after I had created timings for the whole file. After e-mailing support, they told me there was no way of preserving the timings, if I reuploaded the file! So I lost all that work. Then I did it all again, but somehow when I view it, the timings seem to all be out of sync.

So being quite fed up, I decided to investigate some other options. Omnisio looked promising, but it has been bought by Google to be integrated with YouTube, and does not allow new sign-ups (but we might see an interesting addition to YouTube once Google has finished “digesting” them). Finally, I decided to turn it into a video. I had a video of my entire talk, so I positioned that player on my screen, and the PDF of my presentation slides in a small Preview window right next to the video. I then used ScreenFlow to record the screen, and the system audio. I simply played the entire video, and manually advanced the slides at the appropriate time.

This process has some advantages. It’s actually faster than creating the timings with SlideShare’s tool – it only takes the amount of time it takes to watch the entire presentation. It’s also much easier to have very rapid slide advancement, and it also preserves transitions (which SlideShare doesn’t), although I rarely use those.

After recording the whole thing (I had to do it in two sections, and splice together, because I got a warning message about two little space left on the HD in the middle), I cropped it in ScreenFlow to only display the two boxes (video and slides), and exported it to a QuickTime file. This took quite a bit (and don’t try to turn on multi-pass, it will take all night). I uploaded the finished file to Vimeo, and voilà. (See finished presentation on Vimeo).

Although the editing was a bit faster, the post-editing, rendering, and uploading to Vimeo took longer. It’s also far from as elegant, since people cannot easily download the slides, copy and paste from slides, click on links in slides, or search on the content (SlideShare exposes the content as text, to make it Googleable). So still not ideal, but it was a fun experiment that worked fairly well. (It’s surprising how often screencasting comes in handy for grabbing a piece of video that’s streaming in a weird format, I also used it to grab some of the pieces I used in my Open Education around the world medley).

Stian

I wrote earlier about preparing to give a guest lecture in a class called KMD 1002: Knowledge Communities: Patterns and Practices, where I assigned three resources for class preparation: a CIDER talk by Terry Anderson about Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. I also ended up assigning a paper by Marlene Scardamalia: Collective Cognitive Responsibility for the Advancement of Knowledge and one by George Siemens: Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age.

I struggled quite a bit when preparing the actual talk. A nice feature was that I was given access to the class discussion forum and wiki, which they had used to summarize talks and discussions from previous classes, so I read through that, and thought about my material could integrate with what they had already been discussing, and the questions they had been asking.

I have been thinking a lot about the two learning theories connectivism and knowledge building. Both offer a possible model for online social learning, but they are very different. I made a first attempt at sketch out some of the strengths and weaknesses I saw in each of them, and listing some of the issues that I think are worth discussing, and which I am hoping to explore further in the future (and certainly during my PhD).

The material in this presentation is quite raw, but I would love any feedback and comments. I’ve embedded the 37 minute long presentation below, but you can also download just the PDF of the slides, or the MP3 of the audio. The original video (with no slides) also contains the Q&A session at the end (which I have not included below).

Stian

As I wrote earlier, I was invited by Jeff Lail, Jeff Jackson and Laura Pasquini from BreakDrink to participate in their weekly podcast, and discuss P2PU. It was a fun format, and I got some really nice questions. I had a feeling we could have continued chatting for a while, and they invited me back to a future show to give an update, which I’d be happy to do. It was neat seeing people tweeting about the show as it was progressing (although nobody called in with questions).

The direct link to the MP3 is here, and you should be able to listen directly by clicking play below:

Stian

I just came across a new list of the 1000 most visited websites globally, hosted by Google’s AdPlanner. There isn’t too much information about how the list was put together, although it’s noted that certain pages that are not open to the world, spam sites, and porn sites have been removed (it would have been interesting to see how high up the various porn sites would rank). Although all such measures have an element of error, Google should have a fairly good understanding of the world’s internet, and people buying ads need to know very precisely how many users a given web page has, so I would assume that this list is fairly accurate.

Just looking at the top 50 websites, it is very impressive how many Chinese sites are listed! The first few are all English (with Wikipedia as number four, after Facebook, Yahoo and Live). The first Chinese website is Baidu, at number 8, immediately followed by QQ (a Chinese chat client). The third country to appear is in spot 25, with the Japanese version of Yahoo. If you go through the top 50, there are 32 English websites, 15 Chinese and 3 Japanese. If you continue down the next 50 posts, there are more English and Chinese sites, a few Japanese and Korean, and one or two Brazilian and Russian entries.

Indeed, you get the sense that the two super-languages of the World Wide Web are English and Chinese, without any competition. And this makes sense. I was talking to a friend today about demographics, and how India is gaining on China (Wikipedia currently gives China as 1,34 billion and India as 1,18 billion). I asked him what the next country was: the US, with 309 million! Quite a big gap! And of course, although technology growth in India is impressive, none of the Indian languages have much of a presence on the Internet at all.

It’s also important to keep in mind that this list measures top web sites, this isn’t necessarily a good proxy for how much content is available in that language. Some of the sites listed are actually Web 2.0 sites that host content in many languages (I counted Twitter as an “English” webpage, but of course, people tweet in hundreds of languages. The same for Blogger, and even Facebook, etc). Instead of using Blogger, everyone could host material on their own domain (like I do with reganmian.net), which would result in no site from that country being listed on the Top 1000 List.

This is also the reason why Spanish, which according to Wikipedia is the first language of 330-400 million people, has no site among the top 50: It’s scattered over so many countries. Although it’s (mostly) the same language, people still use the newspapers and blog engines of their own countries. There is no surprise that all the secondary languages I mentioned above: Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Korean – are all the national languages of very large countries. If Brazil had been split into lot’s of small South-American countries, with their own individual politics and celebrities, etc, we might not find any Portuguese site on the top list.

This list is important, because many top lists made by Western companies systematically under-represent content not in English (for example Technorati’s list of top 25 blogs, which are somehow all based in the US). These give North Americans the idea that most of the web speaks English, and that there is no point in learning another language.

I hope that the multilingual Internet will continue to grow. And these statistics might be meaningless in the future – we might all be chatting in English on a Chinese social networking site! (Remember, they have more Internet users than the US today, but only 1/4 of Chinese are online… Lot’s of space to grow!)

Stian

I was invited to discuss Peer2Peer University at a newly launched podcast about universities, technologies and student affairs called Campus Tech Connections. According to the website, “[t]he goal is to help campus practitioners understand technology while becoming  active digital citizens”. They use the blogtalkradio platform, which enables people to call in during the show to ask questions, whether through the phone (646 652-2342) or using Skype. The show will start at 8PM EST on June 7th (today), and last for about an hour. Feel free to listen in, and call in with questions and comments. The show will also be recorded, and available later (I’ll post the address here, after the show).

I’ve never been on a call-in radio show before (as anything other than a caller-inner), so I’m excited! Go here to listen to the show.

The show also has an impressive line up in the next few weeks:

• June 14:  Anya Kamenetz, Author of DIY U
• June 21: Eric Frank, Co-Founder of Flat World Knowledge
• June 28:  Burck Smith, CEO and founder of StraighterLine

Update: Recording is available.

Stian

I am currently listening to the Introduction to Sociology course from the Virtual University of Pakistan, whose video lectures I described in a previous post. The course is taught by Dr. Muhammad Anwar, and curious to find some information about him, I googled his name. I came across this discussion about his course, where former students are praising him highly. Tauqir Mehmood Wattoo said:

i have to tell my forum fellows just one thing that i have been a student of dr anwar. he is an authority in sociology and specially in social research.

those choosing sociology must go through these lectures.

Raz replies:

I second your opinion. I didn’t know about Dr. Anwar’s expertise over sociology. It was my good luck that I gave a try to VU lectures and these lectures proved very helpful. After going through Dr. Anwar’s lectures I strongly believe in the comments which Tauqir Mehmood Wattoo has passed for him. This was purely my good luck that I got these lectures without knowing him.

I placed an ordered with VU for lecture notes and CDs on Sociology, Mass Communication, Pakistan Affairs, and Islamiat. Due to shortage of time I could best utilize only sociology and Pakistan study lectures and had a quick review of Islamiat. I utilized Mass Communication CDs and lectures back in 2008 but for 2009 attempt I was running short of time so I could revise only selective topics in a period of two days. Few of these topics were like, Public Relations, Advertisement, Journalism history, and Ethical standards.

Most of the sociology MCQs in 2009 were covered from these lectures. While attempting sociology paper I was of the view that paper has either been set by Dr. Muhammad Anwar or by a person whose approach is similar to that of Dr. Muhammad Anwar. His lectures enrich us with best terminology in sociology which is an added advantage while attempting the paper.

I purchased following two lecture notes on sociology:

1) Introduction to Sociology (SOC 101)
By Dr. Muhammad Anwar
2) Research Methods (STA 630)
By Dr. Muhammad Anwar

Though research methods lecture Notes by Dr. Muhammad Anwar were very useful but I attempted Research Steps question (2009) from Shahnaz Arifullah and K. M Bhatti’s book (Research Process Simplified) in combination with Roger D. Wimmer and Joseph R. Dominick’s book ( Mass Media Research). This combination made my answer very effective.

Two main benefits of VU lectures:
1) To the point and time saving
2) Standard language (Most suitable terminology), Standard approach, generally acceptable stance, free from biasness, and nearly official stance on major issues. (The most beneficial for us to save ourselves from any risk).

Further down, I found out that the textbooks for this class (and all other classes) are available as well!

Assalam-o-allaikum Brother Khoso

The complete VU Library of lectures and Handouts is available at the following link
http://vulms.vu.edu.pk/Library/library.aspx

[...]

I went to that site, and indeed found a 120 page book in English for the Introduction to Sociology Course, and many other courses had both textbooks and PowerPoint slides. I was thinking about extracting all these links, and inserting them into my index, however the interface does not offer any simple way of extracting all the links.

The above postings are from the site CSSForum: Civil Service of Pakistan, a very active forum where users help each other prepare for the civil service exams. They have forums for all the obligatory subjects, and in the sociology section you can find interesting posts like Great Muslim Scientists and their Contributions to the Field of Sociology, discussion of Marxist theory of labor, or a question about the contributions of Ibn-e-Khaldun to the field of sociology. I found it very interesting how the students were actively helping each other prepare for these different exams, and selflessly sharing resources and experiences.

I also found it very interesting to see past exam papers, for example the 2010 bilingual exam on Islamic issues. Students have to give written answers to questions such as “Keeping in view today’s International Political System, can Shariah be adjusted in the Islamic Societies”, and “Keeping in view the requirements of Global Society, determine the freedom and limitations of a Muslim Woman in the light of Islamic teachings”. It would be very interesting to see samples of how the future government bureaucrats of Pakistan answered these questions! There is also a section called “Everyday Science“, which is wonderfully eclectic. Here is a small selection:

Question # 02 : Write short note on the following by giving their exact life span and contributions to the field of science. ( Accurate fact will be appreciated) (10)

a) Al- Beruni
b) Ibn- al – Haitham

Question # 03: What do you know about hereditary disease ? Comment how they are transferred from parents to offsprings ? (10)

Question # 04: Write briefly any five of the following: (Answer in three or four sentences) (10)

a) Plaster of Paris
b) Reflex Action
c) Pace Maker
d) Swine flue
e) Microwave oven
f) Internet
g) Voltage Stabilizer

Question # 05:
A) What is global warming ? Is there any a sunny side to global warming ? If yes , explain. (5)
B) What makes the seasons happen ? (5)

Question # 06: In which region of the world , the following animals are found? Give two main characteristics of each. (10)

a) Blind dolphin
b) Kangaroo
c) panda
d) Kiwi
e) Penguin

Question # 07:
A) In which organ these parts are present in animals or human body ? (5)
B) Describe the function of each briefly : (5)

1. Coronary artery
2. Sino- Auricular Node
3. Aortic valve
4. Auricle

Question # 08: Differentiate between the following pairs:

a) Hydrometer and Hygrometer
b) Perimeter and Telemeter
c) Isotopes and Isomers
d) Flying mammal and Bird
e) Vertebrates and Invertebrates

Question # 09:
A) What are pesticides? Explain how these are dangerous to human beings?
B) What do the following scientific abbreviations stand for?

1) STP
2) LORAN
3) SONAR
4) MAF
5) MeV
6) MASER
7) AWACS
8) CCTV

I wonder how the average American civil servant would have done on this exam.

I think formal and informal OER can have a huge positive impact on international understanding, and to me, this is a prime example of what Mike Caulfield called OER as transparency.

Stian

I find distance universities very fascinating, and have learnt much from my time visiting the Open University of China and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India. Distance universities have been in the forefront of researching alternative ways of delivering instruction and enabling learning, with radio and television, online classes etc. They are also uniquely poised to open up their materials, because their courses have been designed for distance/online learning from the outset. The Open University of the UK, the international pioneer of open universities, has been very innovative with its OpenLearn project.

I was extremely excited to find the amount of material published in India by both the Indian Institutes of Technology and IGNOU. IGNOU both uploaded a very large amount of materials to a DSpace repository called eGyanKosh, and also released thousands of hours of video on their YouTube channel. Being able to watch videos about rural planning, Hindi literature, economics, how to be a radio DJ, and many more topics — from an Indian point of view — is a very exciting opportunity.

This morning I had a wonderful conversation with Alastair Creelman, and he mentioned that the Virtual University of Pakistan (VU) had also put thousands of hours of video on YouTube. I immediately went to check, and found their channel with 5992 videos! (I wonder if there will be a cake served when they reach 6000?)

According to Wikipedia, the VU was founded in 2002, and is “the first distance learning university in Pakistan based entirely on modern information and communication technologies.” In that sense, it differs from IGNOU, which was established in 1985 (WP), and was initially based mainly on correspondence (although they also used satellite TV actively).

What was a positive surprise to me, when I began looking at some of the videos, is that they seem to all be in Urdu. Although Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, many of the universities teach largely in English (similar to the situation in India). The fact that these courses are in Urdu will obviously limit the utility of these courses to the international audience, but radically increase their value to the local population. (And let’s face it, it’s not like the English-speaking population is particularly underserved, globally speaking).

It’s very exciting to me, because I actually studied Hindi for a year (Hindi and Urdu are very similar) and spent three months in India. I am very interested in improving my Hindi, and also in learning Urdu. In the lectures I watched, I could mostly follow the dialogue, because the professors spoke very slowly (sometimes painfully so), and frequently mixed in English words, or used slides in English.

The one problem with the YouTube channel is that unlike the IGNOU account, which uses individual accounts for each faculty (which are all subscribed to b the main account), and playlists for individual courses, the VU account lumps every video into one big pool, and names them with cryptic codes like PSY032-Lecture34. It’s almost impossible to browse around, if you don’t know what you are looking for.

Luckily, they actually store the full title of the course in the description, but this does not come up unless you click on a video. I wanted to see if I could do something about this — mainly to scratch my own itch, and I found that there was a great Ruby library for accessing YouTube metadata programmatically. Using this, you can retrieve all the metadata for every video uploaded by a given user (or in a given category, with a different keyword, etc) using just a few lines of code. I downloaded all the metadata, used the descriptions as course titles, and sorted the filenames alphabetically, and generated an index page.

This page makes it much easier to see all courses on offer, find a sorted list of lectures, etc. Now I can really begin to explore! It’s not perfect, some of the lectures seem to be missing, and there is a course called “Click to add description…”, but overall this is very useful, in just about an hour and a half of hacking, having not even played with the YouTube API previously.

Here’s the code that I ended up with — this downloads all the metadata, and spits out the HTML file that I now host.

require 'rubygems'
require 'youtube_g'

client = YouTubeG::Client.new
allvids = Array.new
count = 1

# get metadata for all videos
begin
 while true
 videos = client.videos_by(:user => 'vu', :page => count)
 allvids = allvids + videos.videos
 count = videos.next_page
 $stderr << count
 break unless count
 end
rescue Exception=>e
end

# sort videos into courses based on descriptions
keywords = Hash.new
courses = Hash.new
allvids.each do |vid|
 unless courses[vid.description]
 courses[vid.description] = Array.new
 keywords[vid.description] = vid.keywords
 end
 courses[vid.description] << vid
end

# start generating the index
puts "<h1>Course titles</h1><ul>"
courses.sort.each do |element|
 puts "<li><a href=\##{element[0]}>#{element[0]}</a></li>"
end
puts "</li><p>"

puts "<h1>Individual courses</h1><ul>"
courses.each_pair do |desc,vids|
 uniq_ary=[]
 puts "<a name=#{desc}>"
 puts "<li><b>#{desc}</b> - <i>#{keywords[desc].join(", ")}</i></li><ul>"
 vids.sort! {|a,b| a.title.downcase <=> b.title.downcase}
 vids.each do |vid|
 next if uniq_ary.index(vid.title)
 uniq_ary << vid.title
 puts "<li><a href=#{vid.player_url}>#{vid.title}</a></li>"
 end
 uniq_ary = []
 puts "</ul><p>"
end
puts "</ul><p>"

Here’s a small sample of the courses available:

• SOC401 Cultural Anthropology
• PSY512 Gender Issues in Psychology
• PSC201 International Relations
• PAK301 Pakistan Studies
• MKT624 Brand Management
• MGT501 Human Resource Management
• MCM516 TV News Reporting & Production
• ISL201 Islamic Studies (seems to be mainly in English)
• CS704 Advance Computer Architecture
• CS201 Introduction to Programming

So go check it out!

Stian