He swings around a college lecture hall on a long rope to show how pendulums work. He demonstrates velocity by firing a rifle. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Walter Lewin has become a global Internet star now that anyone with access to a computer can watch his tough but fun Physics 1, 2, and 3 lectures free of charge. They can even do the homework he assigns his Cambridge techie students (though they won’t get the grades or credit). The Netherlands-born Lewin, 71, told U.S.News’s Kim Clark that putting his courses online took a lot of work and cost about $100,000—but was worth it.

Now that your lectures have already been recorded, do you think it’s necessary to give them in person anymore?

I hope I will be doing [Physics 3] again this year. The students might as well just watch my lectures on the Web, but they will come anyhow because they want to see me…. But many other physics professors [at other colleges] use these lectures as their physics course, which is perfectly fine. They write me notes, saying “Why should we prepare lectures when we cannot compete with the quality of your lectures? We show them in class and use them as a starting point to have discussions with the students,” which I think makes sense. But at MIT, we could not do that…. It’s a tradition. There has to be a live person in the lecture hall.

Continue reading…

e learning and technology, Physics