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.

Comments

Re:Has anyone here actually tried

[AuMatar]

I have. In the end, you have to buy the course books- the lecture notes just aren't detailed enough. They're an aid more than a main source, and they were written with that purpose in mind. Other than that, its no more difficult than any other way of learning from books. The ability to talk to fellow students and figure stuff out is missed (although replacable with web forums as underused as that idea is), but definitely doable. As for talking with professors- I don't think I ever did that in my undergrad, so for me its not missed.

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.

Re:Awesome!

[lymond01]

These will serve multiple purposes, the most common one likely being a bunch of kids sitting around a table working on homework late at night and they get to a problem or analysis and one asks, "What did the prof say about this?", they bop online, fast-forward through the lecture, and listen again to the professor's wise words.

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

[neapolitan]

Yes, good point. I've used the MIT course syllabi for for teaching myself a few topics needed for programming, and they have, on occasion, been very helpful. Harvard streams all its lectures so we could watch them in our dorm rooms, but they were not released outside of the firewall.

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 on Google Video as part of the speaker series, and found it quite interesting. However, I'm a geek, and you probably are too.

Still a better value for the dollar...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

But the top colleges do teach even the low level courses in a different way.

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.)

Look at MIT's calculus course- far more about the theoretical underpinings of calculus than just endless differentiations. While you do get the credits far cheaper the junior college way, you don't learn as much.

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.

As a Berkeley Student...

[PAKnightPA]

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?