Got a yearning for learning? Get your lectures on YouTube
Published 9:43 pm Thursday, April 9, 2009
College too expensive? Try YouTube. It might seem counterintuitive to look for higher education alongside Avril Lavigne music videos, but the video-sharing site has become a major reservoir of college content.
YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU, www. youtube.com/edu.
More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make the channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale and UC Berkeley.
The most interesting content is straight from the lecture hall. Many schools have posted videos of lecturers, introductory classes and even a full semester’s course.
At a time when many are finding college unaffordable and the ranks of the unemployed are swelling, free higher learning can sound like a good way to spend some free time.
“There’s a huge appetite around the world for people to better themselves, to study subjects that they either never got a chance to or haven’t studied in a while,” said Obadiah Greenberg, a manager for YouTube.
In the past five years or so, colleges and universities have been increasingly opening their doors digitally. “That Ivory Tower reputation may be even more dated than the advent of YouTube,” said Scott Stocker, director of Web communications at Stanford.
In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT OpenCourseWare, http://ocw.mit.edu, with the plan to make virtually all the school’s courses available for free online.
As a visitor, one almost feels like you’ve somehow sneaked through a firewall. Within a minute, you can be watching a professor demonstrate the physics of a pendulum by being one himself.
Last December, MIT announced that OCW had been visited by more than 50 million people worldwide. But why would institutions give away their primary product?
Ben Hubbard, of the webcast project for the University of California, Berkeley, believes it has always been a part of a university’s vocation.
“The mission of the university has been the same since our charter days back in the 1800s,” said Hubbard. “It’s threefold: there’s teaching, research and community service. Probably in the 1800s they weren’t thinking of it as the globe, but technology has really broken down those barriers of geography.”
