TED introduces TED-Ed, an educational video portal

TED is popular for its conferences where speakers from around the world come talk about ingenious ideas. These conferences attract a lot of listeners and they’ve become incredibly popular over the years. The videos are available on their site and on YouTube. TED has a bunch of other projects that it operates, and the newest one is called TED-Ed, a site that hosts educational videos. The service is currently in its beta stage, so there are bound to be more features and bug fixes over the months. The videos are absolutely free and those viewing are encouraged to register on the site. Each of the videos contain briefs about the lesson and even a quiz. The site isn’t only for audiences but also for teachers who might want use the existing videos as a tutorial, that can be customized further. Each of the elements of the lesson can be customized by a teacher.

The future of education, online?

The lessons on TED-Ed are designed for upto secondary education level of schooling. TED has tied up with YouTube as host for the videos and teachers can choose to turn any of the videos on YouTube into a Ted-Ed lesson. All the videos hosted on TED-Ed are neatly sorted by series and subjects and are free to all. The portal is still in its infant stages, so there are some 62 well authored video lessons in place, but these are meant to be a demonstration of the abilities of TED-Ed. Once more teachers come onboard, there’s bound to be more happening on the site.

One of founders of TED was Salman Khan, an American educator who also founded the Khan Academy, a service that offers free videos on a variety of topics for all kinds of ages. TED-Ed is a similar project and looks like it has the potential to be a widespread phenomenon. The ability to upload a video on YouTube and create an interactive experience for students, for free, is a relatively new concept. TED-Ed gets its $1.25 million funding from Kohl’s Department Stores