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

Awesome!

[UbuntuDupe]

By watching these, it will have the same effect on me as getting UC Berkeley degree!

(Except for the job offers and stuff.)

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised the internet hasn't made us reexamine the entire nature of our higher education system. Is congregating people in one spot for four years to learn something really the best way to do it? Of course there are physical things that you need access to for a lot of classes, but we could be looking at a future where education is a lot more accessible, transparent, and open. If you could sit in on lectures and classes just because they interest you, there may be a lot more people learning things and getting exposed to knowledge they otherwise wouldn't have. You're right that there would need to be some way to certify and verify things, and that's really the main strength of the current system. I can't help but thinking there's got to be a better way. But we're definitely not there yet, and old institutions die hard. In some ways we're actually moving away from this ideal, college is getting more and more expensive and the State is helping out less and less.

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?

Re:Awesome!

[doktor-hladnjak]

I'm all for making this kind of material publicly accessible. If someobdy wants to watch these lectures, it's great that they'll be able to do that from the comfort of anywhere there's a computer and network connection.

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.

Re:Awesome!

[GnarlyDoug]

I'm sorry, but I really don't see how anyone is going to learn something from a non-interactive lecture on the internet that they couldn't learn from a book in a library....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.

First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests different people learn better with different approaches. 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.

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/ for almost all their courses.

Re:Good for them

[Opportunist]

Actually, that's what universities are about. Or were, rather. Free flow of information and research based on the findings of those before you. Standing on the shoulders of giants and such.

Today, few universities can really afford sharing and distributing their research. It usually belongs to someone else.

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.

Has anyone here actually tried

[MeditationSensation]

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.

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.

Hey! What do you think you're doing?

[Opportunist]

The internet wasn't created to distribute information, dammit!

Berkeley Webcasts

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Depends

[iknownuttin]

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.

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.

The Berkeley Advantage

[Cajun Hell]

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.

Blah blah blah, all code for: "You can't take LSD over the Internet."

;)

already available on UC Berkeley website

[Komi]

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.