Cal offers full courses on YouTube - but not for credit
Ellen Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, October 4, 2007
You don't have to be a UC Berkeley student to be educated like one.
UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.
Other institutions have used YouTube to broadcast occasional classes, but UC Berkeley is the first to offer full courses online, school officials and YouTube said Wednesday....
Some 200 clips have been uploaded to YouTube so far, representing eight semesterlong courses, including Marian Diamond's human anatomy class and Richard A. Muller's Physics for Future Presidents.
I watched one physics course and kept visualizing Science Teachers in High School assigning these for extra credit, or teachers refreshing their own knowledge; but I also wondered how this would affect the bandwidth in a High School Campus, and the fact that most Schools currently block YouTube at School. Then Margo came by and said "It's great, but if you just sit and watch it without a way to ask questions or get background info, it's kind of boring. Is this the way we learn science?" I guess like anything you have to find the good stuff. For instance, here's a clip from a UCB Search Engines Technology & Business course. It's a lecture by Sergey Brin, founder of Google. This provides a great opportunity to hear the perspective of someone you probably wouldn't get to hear otherwise.
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