E-learning Resources

Norhan Eassa
November 26, 2019

The e-learning resources that I want to talk about are ones that have personally helped
me immensely through my journey as a student at school and in college. Hence, I’m really
eager to share them. They are as follows:

1. brilliant.org: I’ve been using this resource since I was in middle school. Back them, it
was just a compilation of different mathematical problems in a few branches of math,
such as algebra, geometry and number theory. You would gain points for the problems
that you would solve based on their difficulty and if you would get enough points, you
would level up in whatever field of math your solving in. Now, however, this website has
become a much more extensive resource. It not only includes mathematical problems
now, but also different sciences such as physics and chemistry, logic, programming
languages, and even quantitative financing. There are also courses and wikis included
on the website so that you can gain knowledge in any of these forms of mathematics
and science. The great thing about this website is the community there that have great
discussions regarding the various problems on the website.

2. The Youtube channel Crash Course: This Youtube channel was truly the reason
why I was able to get through my biology classes during my foundation year in college.
Lead by the duo Hank and John Green along with other instructors, they cover various
subjects such as biology, anatomy, physics, philosophy, and many, many more. The
playful animations and great use of humour and referencing to pop culture extremely
help with letting the viewers stay engaged along with simplifying the concepts and
facilitating comprehension. They certainly do not go through all of the nasty details of
the technicalities of these subjects, however, they do certainly focus on the key concepts
and clarify misconceptions, making these videos the perfect segue into studying the
course materials from your textbook or whatever other form you have.

3. The Youtube channel ZC Open CourseWare: The reason why I’m mentioning
this is because this is an educational resource that I have sort of taken part in. ZC
(Zewail City) Open CourseWare is considered as the first attempt from any university
in the Arab world to provide their courses online along with all of the course materials
(i.e. assignments, lecture notes, exams, etc.). This project was the idea of two of my
friends, Ahmed Fouad, who was the SU Academic Affairs Head at the time, and Omar
Elreefy, one of my colleagues in the major of physics. Ahmed helped a lot with the
logistics of this project and made sure to get all of the support that we needed from the

1
university to start it. Omar Elreefy was the president of the group and was supposed
to form a team in order to actually start documenting courses and choosing the courses
that we wanted to begin with. He contacted me to be the vice president along with
being the head of the lecture notes documentation committee. And from there we
started. We started with filming two of our physics courses, Mathematical Physics I
and Quantum Mechanics I, and we had committees responsible for the filming process,
the editing process, and the course material documentation process. It wasn’t that easy
though, as we were pretty busy at that time with internship applications and with our
many courses. Hence, it was important to train younger students to make sure that
someone could continue our work, especially as all of us older students knew that we
wouldn’t be able to continue work during our senior year. Sadly, our period in this
project ended, but thankfully the new team were able to launch the Youtube channel
and expand the amount of courses included. This resource is still not a huge one, but
it certainly has a promising future and I truly believe that it’ll really help in making
such valuable education more accessible in the Arab world and much more attainable
as our professors explain good chunks of the lecture in the Arabic language, making
the lectures easier to understand for any Egyptian or Arabian citizen in general.