[ArtWomb]

Not surprised a cooking class doesn't lend itself to an easy online port! But the lecture content from Harvard's Science and Cooking with El Bulli's Ferran Adria is still as you mention freely available online for all to enjoy. I recently had a free week pass to Masterclass. And though I found the content more entertaining than enlightening (How to be a Boss with Anna Wintour). There is something to be said about educational content that is given a Hollywood production budget. I think it was always inevitable institutes of higher education would seek auxiliary revenue streams from MOOCs. And an influx of capital could result in lecture videos that are Netflix quality, and that enjoy near 100% levels of retention ;)

Science and Cooking: A Dialogue | Lecture 1 (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9av8-lhJS8

[benrbray]

Those are actually exactly the lectures I watched before attempting to join the very disappointing EdX course by the same professors :).

The lectures on YouTube were evening lectures meant to summarize each week of class, but the actual in-person students learned more about the actual chemistry involved, and did guided experiments to test different properties of food. I was hoping the EdX course by the same professors would give me an approximation that experience, but I was really disappointed. Technically there's a lot of good information still there, but the main problems were that the lectures were split into 2-minute chunks and the EdX UI constantly gets in the way of actually absorbing the content. I decided to buy a couple books on the topic instead.

[drran]

Watching of a movie about agent 007 will not make you a super spy.

To learn something, you need to watch a lecture, then receive a task, perform the task and provide a result, then receive feedback, and, finally, learn from the feedback.

Harvard video lectures are just another form of TV. They are mostly useless without Harvard.