Slashdot Mirror
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.
By watching these, it will have the same effect on me as getting UC Berkeley degree!
(Except for the job offers and stuff.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
You would think that YouTube would balk at being the distributor for a university. Will they try and make money with this?
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/ for almost all their courses.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Over 300 hours of videotaped intercourses?
Did they mean Porntube, isn't it?
Clicking around randomly, I had to laugh at the attendance for Chemistry 3B, lecture 21. Yeah, that's about par for the course for Orgo that late in the term.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
educating themselves with all this online courseware stuff? Seems to me like most people would still need the oversight of having papers due, the classrooms discussions, and the 1-on-1 talks with professors to get the most out of a subject. But I could be wrong.
the possibilities are endless.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Sleeping Kittens 101
Girls Fighting Girls 273: Advanced Techniques
I Love Turtles Symposium
The future looks bright!
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
The internet wasn't created to distribute information, dammit!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So why attend class?
I've been enjoying iTunes U for a while. It's good to see more universities publishing their courses for free online.
I wish I had this back at MIT so I could figure out what Prof. Bekefi was saying.
i'd love to see a lecture or 2 on a subject i'm curious about. I'm out of college but watching a lecture on psychology or history or whatever strikes my interest would be great.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
...since this will allow students to evaluate their lecturing style in addition to the other aspects that they consider when choosing a course. Personally I would have taken a harder calculus class if could have had another better lecturer. And conversely there are a few non-core courses that I would have dropped if I'd seen the way they were taught.
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.
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.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For a while, there have been free video and audio podcasts available on iTunes from several universities, including MIT. The quality is better than Youtube and you can easily download it and take it places.
When you guys say 'news for nerds' you're not kidding.
Folks: streaming is NOT a form of copy protection. Nor is using Javascript to compose the video URL so that things like VideoDownloader can't parse it. You aren't making saving the video impossible - just difficult.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'd think that would be a better choice..... YouTube is nice but I want to be able to download the lectures and watch them on my own time. Not everyone has 24/7 high-speed internet access. I'd love to have high quality videos that I can watch offline.... converting YouTube flash videos to another format for offline storage is going to be annoying.
UC Berkeley has been webcasting their classes for several years now. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ It looks like they're just offloading the storage and network to youtube now.
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.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Berkley students are lucky to go to an American university.
In Soviet Russia, Full lectures post YOU on youtube.
-1 not first post
Of course, it's not the equivalent of a Berkeley education or anything remotely close to it. But i
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.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
They already had a website for that - http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ I guess this moving those videos to YouTube was the next logical step.
Blah blah blah, all code for: "You can't take LSD over the Internet."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
1- For the uni, just shoot the vid and upload it 2- For the student, just fire up the browser to watch x- benefits för all concerned y- profit! if x then y endif
# ~: no sigs today
thanks to berkeley! I'm still miffed at Stanford, Stanford has decided to go I-pod despite 20% unix pc on campus ( princeton college review 2007). MIT 98% unix.
the sample Youtube video? I now remember why I got so much sleep in my university years... zzzzzz
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.
Uh... Macintosh computers *are* UNiX.
* ducks *
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Looking for free business, marketing and so on courses on YouTube (or the entire Internet) just turns up "work from home" scams and dubious paid courses by various "gurus". Not cool.
If you know any good courses in this range of study, please share links.
I respectfully disagree.
The big bucks used to pay for the Professor's authenticity to prevent slick talkers from deluding themselves or others about their subject knowledge.
I have thought that education is a dormant bubble that will shake the world when it pops. All you need is attestation services to prove you have learned the subject.
I know that *some* students thrive on the pressure of a deadline, but that would be a service to that student, not a core necessity. I had one great professor who used a brilliant form of inverse psychology on one of our early classes. Something to the effect of:
"Our Registrar has deposited your check, so I have all the leverage I need. While I care about each of you, I could care less about rules, because rules do not equal learning. For the minimalists of you out there, here is : The book, my syllabus outline, the four test dates, the three paper spec lists, and $10 in supplies. Place those objects on my desk on the dates listed. Find me after the final so we can have lunch.
I can answer a few questions in class. For those who need extensive answers, these are my office hours. Now go home. Since we all know the first day of class is a joke, I won't waste my time. See you on Thursday with chapters 1-3 read because they are also a joke. The best cafeteria Pizza is between 4:45 and 5:00 before the seniors get out of seminar. Bye."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
1: This won't take the place of real fact to face interaction.
2: You still won't get the benefit of having a degree.
3: The lectures really aren't complete without the notes.
4: This will probably mainly benefit people taking the class.
All those points are true for now. But they miss the real point. This is the start of a new, disruptive technology. In time there will be massess of these courses available and their will be much more comprehensive infrastructures around providing them than we have now. This is just a hint of what is to come.
For those who claim that books do just fine, my answer is no they don't. They are static, they do not convey certain types of information well, and people are geared to learn from people. While not truly the same as true face to face instruction, this approach is much closer, and complements reading very well.
In other words, education is on a path to becoming mostly or wholly free, of high quality, and disconnected from time, place, circumstances, and social class. This is part of a larger process of the internet becoming not just an engine for entertainment and commercial sales. It is starting to becoming an engine for moving high density, high quality information around, namely knowledge.
Today marks the first time a university has made full course lecture available via the popular video sharing site.
Maybe they call today new simply because they transfered the videos from Google Video to You Tube, another popular sharing site. I have already watched the entire Physics for Future Presidents series about 6 months ago.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Physics+for+future
Why is a move from Google Video to You Tube such a big deal?
The truth shall set you free!
Since when has YouTube been about making money? Originally, they were about come up with technology that was so ridiculously kewl that Google couldn't stop themselves from buying them out. Now, like most of Google, YouTube is just about coming up with technology that's ridiculously kewl. Google gets huge profits from its keyword advertising, which subsidizes all the other money-losing operations. Sometimes they go through the motions of trying to make the other business profitable, but they don't really have any incentive to do this: Page, Brin, and Schmidt have a voting majority of shares, and don't really answer to the other stockholders.
I will now proceed to complain about how these videos were actually posted a month ago. Typical /., posting stories a month later. How dare they bring something cool and interesting to my attention!?
All your base are belong to Wii.
As a Berkeley Student, the first thing I thought was YES! Now I don't have to go to class. But seriously, this is why I really like UC Berkeley. They are a public school and seem to really take that to heart. While they wont give any schmuck a degree, they are funded in large part by the taxpayers so why shouldnt anyone be able to take advantage of what they have to offer?
I live in Malaysia, and I can never stop appreciating how the Internet and Information Technology led to the me today. During high school I bought alot of pirated CDs that contains ebook for computing. Those CD actually costed alot of money but relatively still hundred times cheaper than just one original book. That was how I started to learn programming, and in my region there was no library or even book shops that had these intermediate programming books. Today I rely heavily on bittorrent and other sources to download pirated ebooks from broadband, and I know much more than what has been teaching in my university.
I realise how powerful knowledge is, and how sux the current education is that produces graduates with good results but little knowledge. Why do we have to get a good result to enter a good university? Why do we have to memorize rubbish and attend specialized tution just to get good grade in examination? Why do we have to spend so much money to get a good education? Why can't we learn the thing we want just because we don't get good results? Why do we need to spend so much money to learn what we want?
If it wasn't these ebooks that educated me, I would be just started learning "what is a loop?" as my other friends do in their first year of university, I wouldn't know the philosophy of Open Source, I wouldn't know how much things is out there waiting for me to learn, and I wouldn't know much enough to care of reading in slashdot.
If Open Education really reached the level of Open Source, then anyone can benifit much more than what I benifited. Education DO need to have the same openess as Open Source.
Of course universities is more than just learning stuff, and it's more of an exposure, but we shouldn't limit the opportunity of learning. And there is some courses that can only be learned through university, such as engineering, doctor and language. But for courses like science and computing we do can gain 90% of the knowledge through Open Education.
I did part of my first degree (Science - Chemistry) as an internal student and part as an external student. I did my entire Graduate Diploma of IT as an external student.
As an external student (at least with the university I studied through), you receive the lecture notes at the start of semester, which are essentially what the lecturer is presenting to the internal students. You also need the same textbooks etc as the internal students.
In reality, even when you attend the actual lecture, the lecturer is rehashing the text books anyway. When I was an internal student, you tended to purchase the lecture notes anyway, as it was a great way to ensure you didn't miss anything. I see these videos as something similar.
BTW isn't the definition of a lecture "a method of transferring the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student, without passing through the minds of either"
If you aren't so busy scribbling down stuff during the lecture, you may actually learn something...
There were still tutorials (online / teleconferences etc). They also encouraged students in the same areas to form study groups to help each other along.
Some subjects also had "residential schools", which were a week or so each semester on campus where you would do practicals (labs), have tutorials etc.
It's definitely not a learning style that suits everyone, but if it works for you, it's a great way to do it.
Ever stop to think
Notice how the exam average is 98/240, yet I guarantee that about 90% of the students got an A/A- on their transcript.
This is part of the reason that a science degree from a "top" school means shit these days. That, and the fact that you could get a Biochem degree from a place like that with just three mandatory wet-lab courses.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
These are already available on the UCB site. 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.
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
"Today marks the first time," blah blah blah. While not offering as large a percentage of their lectures as Berkeley, Columbia University has already been doing that with lectures at their School of International and Public Affairs, also since the beginning of the school year: http://youtube.com/user/ccnmtl I wouldn't be surprised if many other universities were already doing this as well, and that simply evaded Slashdot's notice -- is there any proof that Berkeley actually is the first?
Our lecture halls are so small, they have to use video broadcasts to reach all the students in the class for many of the lectures. The way this works is they put all the students who could possibly fit into one hall with the lecturer, then film the thing and transmit realtime video to the overflow halls. While this may seem like a nice idea, it would actually be much better if students could watch the lectures on their own time.
Med school is packed with many different classes and has a very tight time table here, plus for some lectures students have to travel to halls that are literally in different parts of the city. It would save a lot of time for everyone if the lectures were just recorded and could be played back later whenever the timing is right. That way, they could also be used for exam preparation.
Somehow I doubt my university would ever go for that...
Vouchers? Allow parents to send their children to schools that they want them. Destroy inner city schools, eliminate mainstreaming, or ... whatever - so be it! Being PC or stylish is destroying our children.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I went to an MIT admissions orientation this week and the officer spent a far amount of time talking about collaboration and interaction. When I was a MIT student, it was the buzz of being surround by peole with IQs 140 and higher that really pushed you. A few extreemly motivated people can do this alone, but lots of us need the cahalanging environment.
- 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.
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.
Not sure how many other places have the secondary PBS channels focused on providing some secondary level instruction, but the idea behind this isn't entirely new...
Anyhow, with lectures and other instruction on publicly accessable internet video, it's better than similar TV offerings because now a broader slew of content can be found and you're not forced to wait until some odd hour to catch the show or figuring out how to get it to recorded...
Now all we need are the free online quizzes to review the content by. (It's one thing to watch a lecture, but another to know that the stuff actually sunk in.) Not sure if flash or javascript would be the best way to go, but whatever works...
If lectures were cool, they would have been featured on iPhone commercial instead of the skateboarding dog.
This is great. I see this as finally what universities should have been working towards as soon as the web was created.
However can I draw everyone's attention to the course titled: "Physics for Future Presidents". Of course the lectures are interesting and useful, but the title is scary...
"Physics", "Future" and "Presidents". Three words I'd never expect to be near each other.
I will give preferential attention to any .edu domain results. This usually contains the links for lectures, power-point slides, PDFs, etc. from universities, and should thus be fairly reliable.
After having received a degree in the field of Computer Engineering, I was able to successfully use online courseware (googled, no less) to learn an elective I wanted to take in college, but couldn't (specifically, DSP).
I would dare say I was able to learn how to practically employ a variety of DSP techniques in about two weeks, no prof or classmates. This banks on having taken a Signals class in college...so I was already familiar with a lot of it.
Still, I echo other posts which say that this is not a suitable substitute for a proper education.
:(){
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm
I can sleep at home now!
+0 Meh
Has anyone noticed iTunes U on the iTunes music store? It shows quite a bit of universities and you can download lectures from a number of them, some are audio only, others are video. I have followed a couple of lectures about black holes from MIT on iTunes U.
freely would mean i could watch them in an open standard. very sad that they decided to use youtube.
UC Berkeley's lectures, the ones that do get recorded, had been available online for years. Cool stuff, but for most part, the number of recorded lectures is very limited.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
Halo 3? Is my WOW degree no good now?
the first of those is all but impossible to capture in an online manner
Try working on an open source project if you want to be surrounded by other driven 'students', it's perfectly possible to copy that kind of driven / 'competitive' environment online.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Heh heh...
Jeremy Butler
www.ScreenSite.org
www.TVCrit.com
I have tried learning some courses from MIT courseware. I even create a site to write down what I can learn: http://learningocw.blogspot.com/. I'm force to abandon such attempt because I can't access many study materials. I live in a third world country and there is no good library here. Buying the study materials is really out of the question since the book price is very expensive relative to average salary here.
It's gonna be a great service for me (and people like me) if I can at least access all the lectures.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
you're retarded
...but the professor in the video never called upon me!
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php has been up for at least a half year, probably a lot more too. Why you would want to see the lectures in crappy youtube quality is beyond me...
Wow, this makes it really easy to disrupt class.
...now officially "serious business".
I feel sorry for students who paid big dollars in tuition money to go to this school and take those courses... because now I can get the same knowledge for free. Borrow the textbook from the library and bam, I'm now Berkeley-Educated. Ha.
Good for us, bad idea for Berkeley. This should have been put in a secure area accessible to registered students only.
http://www.open.ac.uk/
They've been going for years, starting with TV programmes and courses done through the post, to today where they do a lot of internet based stuff.
I hope this will result in YouTube adding speed control to their player. I hate watching lectures in 1.0x speed.
Pitch control would be nice too... although sounding like Alvin the chipmunk can make dull lecturers more interesting.
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
I would be interested to know how UC Berkeley faculty view this. Have they sold the distribution rights (either in whole or in part) to the intellectual property of their lectures to UCB?
The higher-ups in education took a look around, and what did they see?
- A worthless administration that, if not elected outright twice in a row, at the very least garnished about half the country's vote.
- A "museum" in Kansas that teaches a complete disrespect for reason and the scientific process
- A world edging closer to a runaway greenhouse effect, with nonacceptance of this fact by an enormously technophobic populous
- A society who's scientific literacy is on par with that of a very stupid 5-yr old
They probably thought "we need to make this stuff more accessible." Knowledge has always been free, but so have reality-tv shows, and those get pumped into your living room every day. Compared to that convenience, the ominous stacks of non-interactive books at the library seem very far indeed, particularly for those who are not education-inclined to begin with.
This is a good thing. A little late for a good thing. But a good thing nonetheless.
They do this at a lot of schools. At Penn State I believe it's called "Nittany Notes." It's quite an operation; to get hired as a note-taker by them, you need to show your transcript (so that your GPA can be verified -- they don't want D students taking notes), and they have fairly strict requirements on not missing any classes, and the deadlines by which you have to have your notes transcribed and submitted.
And I don't think they ask the professors' permission; in class you never have any idea who's just taking notes for themselves and who's taking for Nittany Notes. (They often have multiple note-takers in the same class to make sure there's good coverage, particularly on popular courses. When you buy the note pack you get all of them.)
Not sure how long they've been around for but I think it's a while. I suspect there are probably similar operations at most larger university campuses.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I returned later in life to academics for a masters degree. I had to amass several credits through post grad level courses to meet the requirement. While I initially dreaded it, I ended up spending as much time on campus as possible. The reason was the infectious vitality of the student body. There are always slackers but most students (esp. at the PG level) want to learn and are generally enthusiastic about it. It was hard not to get swept up in the moment. It was at times a complete rush. Humans (even PG students) are social animals and a campus brings like-minded people together where they can motivate each other, exchange ideas, question professorial points of view, and cross-pollinate. OK, the last one isn't strictly academic but it is a perk you can't get sitting alone watching a lecture on YouTube.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
You can use Miro to download streaming videos and watch them later; I have the same problem as you do, this tool is a good solution.
The saddest poem