Jan Academy
Welcome to Jan Academy: free about-ten-minutes tutorials on philosophy! Check out the Jan Academy Youtube channel and click on the Jan Academy playlist. We recently celebrated 30.000 video views (with only 13 videos so far)!
Some viewer comments:
"Thanks so much for this, these are perfect for cementing what I've learned in my texts and lectures. And your accent is wonderful." (ChristophyBrun)
"Thank you for the uploads, I find them quite interesting and geared for the 'average user' without insulting our intelligence. Bravo!" (ComradeAgopian)
"Honestly this video is probably the reason why I am going to pass my political theory class." (nnnat2)
"I love these visual breakdowns. It's so much easier for me to learn metaphysics with the visual aids." (Thoughtitorium)
As you probably realized, the name "Jan Academy" alludes to "Khan Academy", Sal Khan's organization with the noble aim of "changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere". Sal makes great 5-10 minutes videos in which he explains an idea. Sal is amazing because he does almost everything from Algebra to Venture Capital (and I mean that literally: check out the list of videos). However, for some reason, he does not do philosophy! That is why I start Jan Academy! What you get is 5-10 minutes videos on philosophy. In the spirit of Khan Academy, I aim at constructing a whole introductory course in philosophy. I start easy and climb up to more difficult stuff! You will only find videos here: no fancy exercises and evaluation applications! But I think that the strength of the TED/Khan philosophy is exactly in this 5 minutes video format. Here is what Sal has to say about the advantages of teachers using Khan Academy, the videos Sal originally made to help his cousins:
"One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work,having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students --blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other."
The Khan Academy philosophy is also present in TED, the organization devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading". This is TED's philosophy: "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other".