UC Berkeley Posts Full Lectures to YouTube 204
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
Re:Awesome! (Score:2, Interesting)
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 these to learn. It will also be a huge boon to people with dyslexia and other issues. Even more important is the time-shifting aspect. Learn when you have time. Thanks to this trend a lot of people who might not have otherwise been able to get access to this type of education will now be able to do so. In time they'll probably be able to take tests as well and for very little money get a degree at their own pace and within the needs of their own life.
The exciting thing about this is that it will actually allow the internet to do something really great. Provide effective, free, and high quality education to ANYONE who can get a computer and an internet connection. Which is rapidly becoming almost everybody in the world.
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.
Re:Still a better value for the dollar... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a Berkeley Student... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 paying close attention to the spoken dialog you will notice that it doesn't match the subtitles. That's because the films are actually translated twice by different teams. Once for the audio dubbed dialog and again for the subtitles.
For French try and find modern French movies that have made it to the USA. The dialog and titles (for deaf French speakers) usually match exactly.
For Spanish try paying close attention to the spoken language that is often used for public announcements. Our streetcars repeat every announcement like station stops and cross connections in Spanish. Also try using the auto checkout in grocery stores and ATMs in Spanish.
You could actually try talking to people who are speaking the language that you are trying to learn. This has mixed results in real world contacts. Also try using the web translators like Systran or even the excreteable BabbleFish. Libraries have foreign language sections. Often popular titles are available translated into Spanish and sometimes French. Harry Potter and Steven King novels are often available in both English and Spanish, but in different sections of the library. There used to be books with French (and German) written on the left page and the parallel English text on the right page.
The library may have language DVDs or CDs that can be ripped and copied quickly. If you can rip an entire CD of language dialog in a minute or less, then why not just grab five or six of them. Polish, Portugese, Thai, Japanese, Urdu... Why not?
If you take public transportation, try the game of evesdropping (very discretely) on people speaking foreign languages and trying to determine what language they are actually speaking. I've quietly listened to people from Mexico and realized that they weren't speaking any language that remotely resembled Spanish. When I asked my Hispanic friend (soy estan gringo) about this, she said that they probably were speaking Mayan or some pre-Columbian Indian language that survived in the distant rural villages of Central Mexico. You will eventually be able to tell Spanish from Brazilian, Japanese from Chinese, Polish from Russian, and even if you become a bus-language master, the differences between the various SouthEast Asian languages like Lao and Vietnamese.
Anyway, I'm rambling... ironically... lots of language..so little to say.
Re:Awesome! (Score:1, Interesting)
I have been watching these for several months, using them to attempt to update my knowledge. I received my formal computer education a couple of decades ago, and I've neglected it. I chose a specialisation that died (SGI graphics). Most of my work training was as a 'software engineer' in a defense company, but I've discovered that some companies (eg Google) seem to thing that a 'software engineer' is what I think of as a 'computer scientist'. So, I've had to do some training and my location is such that these Berkley courses have been very useful.
Re:The Berkeley Advantage (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 this material from a book, and have, it's much easier for me to do it by listening. I guess textbooks on CD would be a godsend for me -- although extremely boring
Just because YOU don't learn in one particular way doesn't mean that others won't.
Re:Awesome! (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.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Is he still teaching that course? I took that course 20 years ago.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I did it too.