CourseWorld Curates Repository of Free Arts and Humanities Media

  • By Sharleen Nelson
  • 09/24/13

CourseWorld has launched a free video library of educational videos focused entirely on arts and humanities materials.

Resembling a course catalog, CourseWorld is a non-profit initiative that relies solely on crowd-sourcing contributions from site users and freelance volunteers. The organization has gathered a vast array of liberal arts topics into one place, making it easier for online learners to find and browse content, which includes lectures, panel discussions, archival footage, documentaries, and historic interviews culled from YouTube.

The free educational hub features 16,000  indexed and keyword-tagged videos in 700 categories. In the humanities section, topics include classic literature, culture and gender, history, languages, literature, media, philosophy, and religion. The arts section includes videos sorted by art history, architecture, creative writing, dance, film and  TV, fine arts, music studies and music performance, and theater. From these initial categories, the videos are further sorted out to as many as three levels. Videos can also be sorted via custom keyword tags.

In addition, users are invited to crowdsource the materials on the site. Following a wiki-like approach, users can provide input and correct mistakes, leave comments, ask questions, add or change tags, recategorize videos, and share them to other social media sites. Other features include the ability to queue content for later viewing.

Made up of 50 volunteers from around the world who collaborated to index videos, CourseWorld is a nonprofit, non-commercial video library portal that provides videos in the arts and humanities. Visit courseworld.org to learn more.

About the Author

Sharleen Nelson is a freelance journalist based in Springfield, Oregon. She can be reached at [email protected].

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