Missed the biology lecture? Fear not, there's YouTube

Having difficulty making that first period university lecture? Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future it won't matter. Lectures could be filmed and uploaded onto the web. This is the plan at University of California, Berkeley.

In what is being hailed as a first in academia, Cal Berkeley, a university with a reputation for revolutionary thinking, announced this week that it will begin putting hundreds of hours of class lectures on the video-sharing site YouTube. There are already 201 UC Berkeley videos on the site, ranging from an integrative biology lecture where the professor gets very friendly with a droopy skeleton to a guest lecture delivered by Google founder Sergey Brin in 2005. Physics, biology and chemistry will all be added during the course of the semester.

UC Berkeley's decision is bound to generate debate among academics about the value of opening a university's doors to the general public. A year ago, I wrote about universities' unwillingness to get behind the podcasting craze. Some universities are putting guest lectures and the occasional debate online for others to download or stream, but very few are putting this morning's chemistry lecture online to help the struggling students better understand what they've missed.

The fear is that doing so will upset the classroom dynamic. It will be a reason for students to sleep in and miss class altogether. Another concern is that such a move is seen as giving away free the university's intellectual property. I don't agree with either argument. I teach a journalism course at a university here in Rome -- here's the online newspaper the students produce during the semester -- and I can tell you the real reason why academics will continue to fight the invasion of YouTube and podcasts onto their turf. They fear the exposure. Some do not want their lectures being broadcast for fear it will be nicked by less scrupulous academics. Others don't want the general public peering in and - gasp - rating the lecture or leaving a comment.

I can only hope UC Berkeley's move will begin to change this backwards thinking.

Comments

[JFLEMING]

Open University lectures used to be free to view on BBC2 late at night. Now they are sold as course materials only available on DVD.

[Gal]

Good news ...
I'm studding in Israel and it's really helpful to watch other universities lectures. MIT already broadcasts their lectures on their website: http://ocw.mit.edu/