Free Astronomy Course Taught Online by an APOD Editor

[adrianxw]

No lectures this week?

[rigelan]

Thanksgiving week. American Holiday. School's out for a week.

[adrianxw]

Hmmm, I thought "Thanksgiving" was a single day.

[rigelan]

Technically.

Thanksgiving is Thursday. Secondary schools typically have class on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Then take a break on Thursday, Friday.

Private (not public) colleges can have breaks whenever they want, but publicly funded colleges tend to take all Thanksgiving week off. Michigan is a public state college. I guess its probably easier to schedule. I know my college (Iowa State) took all week off for thanksgiving. We still get the recommended number of classtime hours for the semester by making sure we start early enough in August.

This is what I've experienced living in the Middle of the US. But I suppose there are always exceptions.

[adrianxw]

I see, okay.

(Sorry for the delay. Your reply is dated the same day as my sudden and rather unexpected entry into hospital.)

[cherlin]

RJN wrote:
>I do not have the software myself to put these lectures in a format playable only through a web browser.

There is Free Software to do the job, available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Those of us in the Free Software community prefer to use formats that are publicly defined and not under patent. In this case, Ogg Theora format would be the best. You can get the ffmpeg2theora conversion utility

http://en.flossmanuals.net/ffmpeg2theora
"You can send live video from a video camera across the internet, capture video from a DV camera, convert other formats to Ogg Theora, change the size of video files, add extra audio tracks etc etc etc."

with a GUI frontend.

http://www.softpedia.com/downloadTag/theora+converter

Free Manuals at http://en.flossmanuals.net/
including

VIDEO EDITING
Kino
Avidemux
Ogg Theora
GTranscode
ffmpeg2theora
Handbrake

If you need technical assistance, ask me offline. (mailto:echerlin@gmail.com) I will put you on to one of my friends in the Video business.

(Disclosure: I am an anti-Microsoft, pro-Free Software "bigot", and a writer and editor for FM, including How to Bypass Internet Security and Introduction to the Gnu/Linux Command Line. I also work on astronomy and other course material for the Sugar software from the One Laptop Per Child project: laptop.org, sugarlabs.org, earthtreasury.org)

What would you say to letting us translate your lectures to the languages of countries in the One Laptop Per Child program, and either dub or subtitle your videos? With corrections?

http://translate.sugarlabs.org/
http://www.earthtreasury.net/worknet/?p ... gTextbooks

[cherlin]

Aha! Even better.

Firefogg is an addon for the free software browser Firefox that can encode Theora videos on the fly, as it uploads them to a website.

http://firefogg.org/