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.

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.

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.

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.