UC Berkeley Posts Full Lectures to YouTube

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.

Good for them

[AuMatar]

Free sharing of knowledge will only help create more and better engineers and scientists. MIT does something similar as well- at least outlines, and sometimes full lecture notes and videos are available at http://ocw.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] for almost all their courses.

Berkeley Webcasts

[Anonymous Coward]

UC Berkeley has been webcasting their classes for several years now. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu] It looks like they're just offloading the storage and network to youtube now.

Re:Awesome!

[mikael]

Have you not heard of the Open University that is run by the BBC? [open.ac.uk]. You an cregister for the course, get the course materials sent to you by post, and the lectures would be broadcast on TV at the odd hours that no-one else would be watching. In those days, the main channels only started at 9.00am for school programming, and closed down at 12.00pm . Between those hours , Open University lectures would be broadcast, and repeated on the weekends. That allowed people to work their day jobs and study part-time, even more so if they had VCR.

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.

already available on UC Berkeley website

[Komi]

These are already available on the UCB site [berkeley.edu]. I do like the YouTube format better, but the selection from the Berkeley site is currently larger. They have some great analog transistor design classes there.

Re:Good for them

[Joe Tie.]

Keep in mind that a vast repository of knowledge is already locally available for free for modest effort at your local library

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.