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UC Berkeley Posts Full Lectures to YouTube
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Oct 03, 2007 04:28 PM
from the education-for-the-masses dept.
from the education-for-the-masses dept.
mytrip writes to tell us that Berkeley is now using YouTube as an important teaching tool. Today marks the first time a university has made full course lecture available via the popular video sharing site. Featuring over 300 hours of videotaped courses initially, officials hope to continue to expand this program.
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Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
(Except for the job offers and stuff.)
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever you make education more widely available you improve all aspects of society, so it's in everyone's interest to be able to do something like this. Is progress being held back simply because of technological hurdles or is there elitism and old-thinking that's keeping the system from evolving?
Parent
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Berkeley grad though, I generally wouldn't attribute very much of the value of my education there to lectures I sat (or slept) through. Especially in Computer Science, most of the lectures probably didn't differ a whole lot in content or form from those taught at other less prestigious institutions. Most of what I learned came from being surrounded by other driven students in a unique environment and completing challenging assignments. In particular, the first of those is all but impossible to capture in an online manner.
Parent
The Berkeley Advantage (Score:5, Funny)
Blah blah blah, all code for: "You can't take LSD over the Internet."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You obviously never took Chem 1A with Professor Pines. The man blew something up or set something on fire during every lecture (on purpose). If I hadn't already known I wanted to be a structural engineer, he'd have convinced me to major in chemistry. A brilliant man. Makes me sad when I hear about everyone out there who struggles with freshman chem because it doesn't engage them correctly.
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Is he still teaching that course? I took that course 20 years ago.
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This is the start of education for the masses. Books are nice, but they don't convey enough information of certain types. The lectures will help go beyond that. Even barely literate people will be able to use t
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything that can be said in a lecture can be written in a book. Anything that can be drawn on the board or presented on an overhead projector can be presented in a book.
Education doesn't come from sitting for lectures. At best the lectures provide the very most basic information to start the learning process. The real learning happens from interaction, assignments, and studying for tests. The value of a university isn't the lectures, it's the resources available to someone when they don't understand something they're studying. Whether that's classmates learning the same things at the same time, or expert professors and grad students (TAs) available through recitations or office hours, it's not recorded lectures and textbooks.
Parent
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests different people learn better with different approaches. [vaknlp.com] Not all people learn well from reading the written word. Hearing it or seeing it will provide a great benefit for speed, retention, and comprehension for many people. Just because you do well with books does not mean everyone does.
Second, a book is no more interactive than the lecture series will be. The lecture series + book is a much better combination.
Third, with the internet you will soon have blogs or interactive discussion boards around these lectures. It's just the way the internet tend to be. So it will become interactive to a lessor or greater extent. Even if you miss most of the interactive action, if the discussions are retained it is likely the bulk of your questions that arose will be answered, making it far superior to reading a book in isolation. At minimum you'll get the added benefit of a FAQ, and if you're lucky you'll have an active forum and possibly even the ability to communicate with an authority.
Fourth, this is just the start. Soon these educational videos will include dynamic information. You can't show a heart pumping in a book. You can't show a sterling engine in operation in a book. It's static. With video you can show, well, video. These lectures won't stay just being a video of some professor. Eventually someone will start putting out educational video that is much richer in content and leverages what you can do with video. There are tons of things you can do with video that you can't do with a printed page.
Fifth, thanks to the feedback loops of the internet and network effects, the best videos will be found, rated highly, and rise to the top. So the best sources of information will soon be easy to find.
The current crop of videos aren't all that important. It's what they probably portend for the future that is important. Fully dynamic, multiple approach (written, visual, auditory), interactive, free, at will education.
Parent
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I'm an auditory learner. I do much better by sitting in a lecture (even when I'm not fully paying attention) than I do from reading a book myself. I also have an uncanny ability to remember, nearly down to the word, conversations that happened years ago -- this infuriates my wife but my friends find it to be crazy.
So, while I could learn
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you miss a class, you can view the lecture online.
Attending a centralized campus doesn't work for everyone, and online lectures are a good thing for full-timers. But I wouldn't TRADE one for the other -- attending college is like being hand-held into the real world in terms of responsibility (doing your own laundry), being social (interacting with peers), and building relationships (both friendly and business).
Parent
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Yes. If by "learn something" you mean "get a college education", that is; if you mean "learn some specific, limited, subject" then no.
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Informative)
But now, the matierals are easier to distribute. From their website:
The course materials
We use a variety of media to help you learn. Your course may use any of the following different media that you will use from home (or wherever you choose to study):
* printed course materials,
* set books,
* audio cassettes,
* video cassettes,
* TV programmes,
* cd-rom/software,
* web site,
* home experiment kit.
When Saturday morning kid's TV was boring, you could just change channels and watch presentation on mobius strips, fitting cubes into spheres, coastal erosion, the dangers of matching the harmonics of airplane engines/wings, bridges and wind speed, lasers and travel at relativistic light speeds.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When Saturday morning kid's TV was boring, you could just change channels and watch presentation on mobius strips, fitting cubes into spheres, coastal erosion, the dangers of matching the harmonics of airplane engines/wings, bridges and wind speed, lasers and travel at relativistic light speeds
I think you know you're a geek when, as a child, you get up early on Saturday mornings and quickly get bored with cartoons and start watching whatever the OU are showing.
Yes, I did it too.
How long will that be free? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Why? They don't mind being the distributor for thousands of independent creators... nor do they mind being the distributor for the numerous "web TV shows" that have official YouTube channels.
Of course they will. They'll apply the same business model that they are applying to all content uploaded to YouTube... Which is, apparently, to generate a huge community of video-posters and video
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Good for them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, few universities can really afford sharing and distributing their research. It usually belongs to someone else.
Parent
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Much as I would like to think that releasing video lectures will make people tune in on their Saturday night and become wonderfully educated citizens, I think this will be an evolutionary tool for a (relatively) niche market. Keep in mind that a vast repository of knowledge is already locally available for free for modest effort at your local library, in book and video forms, and look how masses of people are beating down doors to get in there.
Nevertheless, I do feel the possibilities are large, and a few immediate points come to mind:
- A complete (spoken) language course on Youtube / web for free would be very valuable. I could easily imagine sitting down for many hours watching a series of these and emerging with conversational language. This would be very useful prior to a planned trip so you could hit the ground running.
- Courses are very good at integrating study tools for a topic. If you try to learn calculus by picking up a book, you can probably do it. However more complex / scattered topics (Renaissance painting in Italy, Advanced concepts in cryptography, etc.) are very easily done using lectures plus book supplementation to guide one so you don't get lost / swamped in the topic.
Personally, I can't wait for video lectures to become freely available. I watched Andrew Morton at Google [google.com] on Google Video as part of the speaker series, and found it quite interesting. However, I'm a geek, and you probably are too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Have you been to a public library recently? The largest in my state doesn't even have any journal subscriptions. I know the quality varies from place to place, but a fairly high percentage of them are struggling along with almost no budget at this point.
spoken language course (Score:3, Interesting)
One way to pick up French or Spanish is to use the alternate audio and subtitles found on nearly all Hollywood DVD movies. Often there is both audio and subtitles in both French (for the Quebec audiences) and Spanish along with English second subtitles for the deaf.
When pay
videotaped intercourses (Score:2, Funny)
Did they mean Porntube, isn't it?
Wardrobe! (Score:3, Interesting)
Clicking around randomly, I had to laugh at the attendance [youtube.com] for Chemistry 3B, lecture 21. Yeah, that's about par for the course for Orgo that late in the term.
Has anyone here actually tried (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Has anyone here actually tried (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm reading the course book for MIT's signal analysis course now. I'm actually understanding the concept of Fourier transforms better now than I did in college with a professor teaching it- the book actually explains the math, something my prof never did.
Parent
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I agree... and I don't think anyone is claiming otherwise.
"Getting a degree" is so much more than just sitting in on lectures. Labwork, discussions with professors (and other students), libraries, and many other things act together to shape a person's education.
The
Depends (Score:4, Insightful)
For a course that I have to take - yes. For something that I'm really interested in - No.
I wish I can remember the term, but there's this style of teaching/learning that's called something like Discovery Learning - I think. Anyway, here's an example of how it works and this is how I learn(ed) computer science (I'm 42 and always learning) in a nutshell:
I see something, an algorithm, a piece of code in a language I've never seen before, whatever. I then say to myself, "WTF is that! I have to find out!" I then Google for it and start reading up on it. When I was a kid and learning how to program graphics, I started teaching myself geometry and trigonometry so I could eventually get the Apple II to draw graphics. The information has stuck with me until this day. Now, the grammar that I had to learn hasn't - as if you couldn't tell.
I really think if our education system got away from the rote learning and drills and allowed kids to learn and have fun at it - it can be fun when you are personally discovering something - our education would greatly improve.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It won't supersede "classical style" education, but it can broaden the horizon of students (and lecturers/professors).
Now, I have the opportunity to (kind of) attend a talk of Sergey Brin (as in TFA) irrespective time and place. I mean, I could even point one of this talks/lectures out to my professor/supervisor and discuss it with him and thus combine the benefits of both kinds of knowledge transfer.
Science without access to knowledge is impossible. So this is a good development.
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I'll be taking... (Score:4, Funny)
Girls Fighting Girls 273: Advanced Techniques
I Love Turtles Symposium
The future looks bright!
Re:I'll be taking... (Score:4, Funny)
You forgot: "Advanced particle physics 3B, lecture 21: Will it Blend?"
Parent
Hey! What do you think you're doing? (Score:5, Funny)
awesome idea (Score:2)
Also positive for good lecturers... (Score:3, Insightful)
And hopefully in the end it will lead to a somewhat higher standard in lectures all over in the long run even if there are some that will never change.
Last gasp before the masses realize... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if this is the last gasp before the masses realize...
If you need to pay your own way though college (like I did), you're much better off buying 100- and 200-level credits at the local junior college and saving your money for the 300+ level stuff universities specialize in. (The teaching quality of 100/200's in the junior colleges is usually better than that at universities too - you get an actual teacher with a masters who came up through the high school ranks instead of some useless grad student who's stuck with you because he/she can't get a job.)
Still a better value for the dollar... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure about that - I picked up my bad attitude at Duke U, and they like to think of themselves as a "top" school. (Maybe I should have accepted MIT's invitation instead.)
I suppose that might be marginally useful if you're going to get a doctorate in math someday, but I was just a lowly engineering major trying to get on with life without picking up student loan debt. If I was interested in the bells and whistles, I could have gone to the local bookstore and picked up a book on the history of math, mathematicians, etc.
Instead, I was self-funded and debt-free a year out of college: the kind of accomplishment that gets employers' attention when competing with lightweights who coasted through college on their parents' dollar.
Parent
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Streaming (!= Copy protection) (Score:2)
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They want you to come back to their site to see the advertisements. Why should they make it easy for you to not?
What about Google Video? (Score:2)
Berkeley Webcasts (Score:5, Informative)
w00t! (Score:2)
This seems to be part of a trend; I know some scientific journals are considering putting their articles online for all to read, instead of charging exorbitant subscription fees like they do now.
I'd like to see old lectures online, too--watching Richard Feynman lecture on physics would be too cool for words.
As a Berkeley Student... (Score:3, Interesting)
already available on UC Berkeley website (Score:5, Informative)
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You must... /*Oh wait, thepartyanimal (1149043)*/ ...you are new here!
/*Ducks to hide his own id number*/