Today, TED, the organization behind the inspiring and world-changing TED Talks has officially launched its TED Ed YouTube channel featuring 12 videos. TED Ed is an initiative dubbed “Lessons Worth Sharing” that seeks to transfer the same phenomenal success that the TED Talks have had so far to the educational arm of the organization.

The initiative will see lessons ranging from symbiosis to aliens to aviation compressed into ten or less minute/s animated clips. The lessons will feature captions for those who have impaired hearing, as well as an interactive transcript for those who may want to jump to content.

The videos will be mostly user-generated and TED is inviting the public to nominate educators and animators and the suggestion of lesson ideas in order to move the agenda forward.

According to the TED Ed website, the initiative seeks to “capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world.”

Image via Wikipedia

“Right now there’s a gifted educator somewhere out there delivering the life-changing lesson. The TED-Ed team hopes that anyone that’s passionate about education will help us find that teacher, capture that moment, and amplify it the way it deserves to be amplified.”

The new channel has launched on YouTube to offer a more accessible platform for the content as compared to the TED Talks wholly hosted on the organization’s website.

All videos will be free and downloadable for offline viewing as well as shared widely.

The organization, and indeed all of us, hopes that the TED Ed videos will be as popular as the TED Talks videos and will go a long way towards making universal learning and education a reality.

About Daniel Mbure

Daniel is a writer, strategist and serial tech entrepreneur. Follow Daniel on Twitter @thespianic