With online lectures, MOOCs, and open courseware, it's probably never been easier to get access to college-level instruction on a huge variety of topics. But yesterday saw the launch of a new entry dedicated to scientific concepts: the World Science University, launched by the group that runs the World Science Festival.

The WSU takes a somewhat different approach to things, offering two levels of courses in physics, depending on how interested you are in delving into the underlying math. It's also got what you might call a physics FAQ, with answers provided in video form. We've been playing with the beta version of the courses over the last few weeks, and we sat down with WSU founder and lecturer Brian Greene to talk about why they've decided now is the time to tackle online science education.

Launching a university

Greene said that he was motivated by his experiences with the World Science Festival and his TV programs. Audiences were clearly interested in the science, but there was really no place for them to follow up on the things that interested them—"you're never going to teach anybody real quantum theory in a 90 minute TV program." But he felt that there wouldn't be a big divide between interested novices and college physics students.

Separately, he'd been experimenting with remote lecturing since he first moved to Columbia in 1995 (he still had lecture responsibilities at Cornell at the time). "In 1990s, tech was really bad," Greene told Ars. "But the tech gradually got better, and we thought it was time for a rethink." Not all the tech was where he wanted it to be, however—Greene said that the video board he uses to handle diagrams and displays during his lectures was put together in-house and runs its own custom software.

The WSU material is split into what he called a "three layer experience." Science Unplugged material is the simplest, as it just involves Greene explaining a topic or answering the question in a short video, without visuals or a prepared script. Most of these are based on questions he's been asked in various contexts, although he's encouraging users to send in additional ones.

The next layer is what are termed short courses, comprised mostly of videos that Greene described as "about the level of a NOVA program—you don't have to know math." Rather than answering random questions, however, these are designed to provide a coherent view of a topic, introducing and explaining key concepts and then gradually building on them. Viewed in the proper order, Greene said, the videos build to a broader understanding: "These require a minimal commitment—they should take a few weeks—but will give you a deeper grasp than what you'd get in a NOVA program."

The short courses come with review videos and office hours, where there is a set of pre-established questions, each with a video providing an answer. Greene didn't think the canned solutions posed a problem, as "a good faculty member can anticipate 90 percent of the students' questions." Anything that gets asked by those taking the class but isn't covered just means that Greene will have to go shoot an additional video.

At the University level, these are supplemented with additional and more detailed material and interspersed with short quizzes. Each question comes with a detailed video answer of how to work it out. If a student makes it through, WSU will present them with a certificate of completion; do it while getting 75 percent of the quiz questions right, and you get a certificate of achievement (Greene says they're also considering adding a final exam).

Teaching relativity to a biologist

How does it all work? Even in the beta version of the site, pretty well. So far, all the material is provided by Greene, which means you'd better like his speaking style, or a full course could be a long experience. He's animated, speaks emphatically, gesticulates, and uses his whole body for emphasis at times. If you prefer a low-key lecture style, this isn't your place.

Greene told Ars that the technology had hit the point where it was possible to do much more with lecture: "to me, it's just a very different experience, one that pushes the notion of digital education to the next level." While that may sound like hyperbole, the system the WSU team has developed is pretty impressive. The video blackboard software lets Greene write freehand, draw straight lines, and do other forms of diagrams with ease.

But it also displays interactive animations. Greene can (to take one example) set a clock running as if it were moving at different fractions of the speed of light, letting you see how time dilation slows down that clock. It can also display preset animations that help people intuit why that time dilation takes place. In these cases, the animations really do add to the learning experience, as does the ability to run the same demonstration with different values for the speed of the clock.

The software on the Web side of things is pretty good as well. Once logged in, the system keeps track of what you've seen and allows you to track and resume your progress through both the short- and university-level courses. All the videos are up on YouTube, and they worked without a hitch, but some of the specialized demonstrations required the Wolfram CDF player, a browser plugin.

Although I've not taken a single course from start to finish, I started the one on relativity at both the short course and university levels. I found them both pretty engaging, even though it's a topic where I've already had to learn the basic outlines of the theory. At least one of Greene's animations made a lot of intuitive sense to me and has already helped me keep some aspects of relativistic time dilation straight in my head.

Just the beginning

So far, special relativity is the only game in town, but at least two other physics courses are in the works, one on general relativity and one on quantum mechanics. Greene hopes to expand beyond physics in the future, though, and get other lecturers in to handle the topics where they have expertise. And the courses as they exist aren't considered the final word. "Feedback from the users is the best way to figure out how to iterate," Greene said. In that sense, simply launching the site is a major step toward figuring out how to improve it.

Personally, I'm enthused about the general concept. A program like COSMOS can get people interested about new topics, but it can't give them a deep understanding. If someone were to watch Neil deGrasse Tyson walk through the cosmic calendar and decide they wanted to learn more about cosmology or evolution, however, there wasn't previously an obvious place to send them. With the layered approach of WSU, they should eventually be able to take a short course in these topics and, if they still want to, dive in to the university level.

Right now, with only a single subject matter's course functioning, that's an unfulfilled promise. But the software side of things, as well as the approach to content delivery, seem very promising. Hopefully, WSU has the staying power to fill out its course catalog.