It’s not going to revolutionize education, flip the classroom, or replace teachers, but the new education site from TED looks like it could be a great resource.

TED-Ed (Lessons Worth Sharing), takes presentations from their collection and elsewhere, blends in some animation to give them more context and interest, groups the videos around nine subject areas, and adds some additional instructional resources.

Although many of the articles reporting on their opening this week compare this to the Khan Academy, TED-Ed is very different and much more substantial. For one thing, this new site is more about ideas and concepts rather than providing step-by-step instructions for rote processes.

Like Kahn, TED-Ed tracks your use of the materials. But instead of a self-assessment section based solely on multiple choice questions, the site asks users to do more in-depth thinking about the presentation they’ve just watched and offers additional resources to explore.

However, the more interesting, and potentially more powerful, part of TED-Ed is the ability for teachers to create their own lessons around the material (what they call Flip This Lesson) and share them with the larger community. Even better is the open invitation to submit ideas for lessons and to participate in the creation process. It opens some interesting tools for teachers to enhance and extend their instruction but also intriguing possibilities for student creative involvement as well.

No, it’s too soon to declare that TED-Ed is the catalyst that will forever alter public education (I suspect someone has already made a similar declaration), but it is an excellent start and something worth watching as it grows.

Watch the short tour of the site and see what you think.