The University of California, Berkeley now has its own dedicated section of Google Video with over 250 hours of educational content, including course lectures and symposia, available to the public free of charge.
As the official blurb puts it,
The University of California, Berkeley is the preeminent public research and teaching institution in the nation. From classic literature to emerging technologies, the curricula of our 130 academic departments span the wide world of thought and knowledge. Supported by the people of California, the university has embraced public service as an essential part of its mission since 1868. The content on this page —drawn from campus seminars, courses and events—is just one part of UC Berkeley’s commitment to the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of our state, the nation and the world.
Currently, the section includes a half dozen UC Berkeley courses in their entirety, including “Physics for Future Presidents, “Integrative Biology,” and “Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business.”
Also available are symposia on subjects such as climate change and synthetic biology, a noontime poetry reading series, a debate over the politics of obesity, and what one press release ominously terms “speeches by leading scholars.” The University has also announced plans to add more content in the near future.
Earlier this year, UC Berkeley joined a dozen or so other universities in publishing content on iTunes. These “coursecasts” (in contrast to the video lectures) are on the MIT Open Courseware model, and the lectures are available to the public without charge. UC Berkeley Courses on iTunes include Biology 1, Chemistry 1, Physics 8, Hubert Dreyfus’s Philosophy 7: “Existentialism in Literature and Film” and Jennifer Burn’s “History 7B: From the Civil War to the Present.” Campus lectures and performances as well as campus tours and sport events are also available.
But Dave, Is This Something?
Well, UC Berkeley, Google, and the consensus of the blogosphere would certainly answer the Letterman-Schaeffer question, “Heck, yes, it’s something.” A favorite headline in the press reports is a variation of “Attend UC Berkeley Free.” At least one economics blog labels it a disruptive innovation.1
While other educational institutions have made coursework available to the public for some time through various media, most notably via MIT’s Open CourseWare, the UC Berkeley/Google boosters make much of the idea that, in the words of one writer, “the video aspect of this Google and UC Berkeley partnership is far beyond downloads of lecture presentations and professor notes.” UC Berkeley itself points out that it is the first campus to post entire course lectures online and “the only school with its own page on the Web site of Google Video.”
The Heck Of A Guy answer is the more profound, albeit less gratifying, “I dunno.”
My lack of enthusiasm may appear odd, given that I
- Get excited about every damn thing that appears on the internet, that is prefixed with “e-,” “i-,” or “cyber-,” or that is associated with Google
- Was, as a consequence of my choices of undergraduate schools, a de facto autodidact myself
- Count myself among the elite when it comes to populism
- Bow to no one in my enjoyment of watching a Get Smart rerun
On the other hand, I’m not convinced that course lectures are the ultimate teaching methodology. In any case, it would be a simple (but, based on my personal experience, unnecessary) exercise to match records of (non)attendance and names on diplomas to prove that a decent minority of students find that satisfactorily completing course work (and, one assumes, learning) did not require perfect or even frequent classroom attendance. And, while the time required to study from a text can be accelerated, a one hour lecture is going to require at least one hour; if portions must be replayed for clarity, the time spent will increase.
Nonetheless, the lecture format will doubtless appeal to some. Even better, the hip and trendy, happening now “Long Tail” economic theory2 holds that it is relatively cheap to maintain a wide inventory of goods (such as lectures on esoteric, technical subjects) on the net even if they are desired by a limited number of consumers.
Finally, those in charge make it clear that the Berkeley-Google courses, like the MIT Open Courseware offerings, do not offer credits toward graduation,
So, my best guess3 is that the Berkeley-Google videos are not a case of disruptive innovation but are an interesting improvement over anything else available now.
The crucial issue, it seems to me, is credentials. I suspect, cynic that I am, that the emphasis on non-credit status can be attributed as much to educational economics as scholastic idealism. As non-credit offerings, the lectures are valuable to a few highly-motivated individuals who are dedicated to self-improvement and to others who have a interest in a specific topic.
This arena may become more exciting if, say, Google, in hopes of increasing the number of visits to its sites, pushes Berkeley or another institution to somehow officially acknowledge that their video viewers learned something, perhaps requiring an examination (for which they might well charge a fee). Google has a history of making attractive offers in exchange for institutions cooperating on projects. Or, perhaps, another organization could provide the credentials. What if, for example, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) which already offers online courses itself, told its members, in effect, “Learn this stuff however you like; just pass our exam afterward and get this dandy certificate with our likewise nifty seal on it. And, by the way, these free video courses from Berkeley look interesting.” (The IEEE may do that already, for all I know.) It’s even hypothetically possible, I suppose, that an abundance of open educational sources could cause a cultural shift that diminishes our fervor for credentials, but that seems less likely.
In any case, the UC Berkeley offerings at Google Video can be found at
UC Berkeley Google Video Home Page
Footnotes
- A disruptive innovation is a new technological advance, a new product, or a new service that goes beyond making incremental improvments over the competition to completely overturn the dominant technology or product in the market. The replacement of animals with steam and internal combustion engines as a power supply is an example of a disruptive innovation.↩
- The Long Tail, as an economic theory, was developed by Chris Anderson, who argues that individual products for which there is a low demand, taken collectively, can marshal market share in the same proportions as the bestsellers in that category if the distribution is sufficiently large. The examples most frequently given are Amazon.com and Netflix, both of which sell or rent large numbers of titles that are not widely popular individually.↩
- I am, the careful reader will note, making every effort to maintain an air of humility because (1) I really don’t know how this project will play out so “guess” is the correct term, and (2) I don’t want to end up in one of those collections of “stupid predictions” of the “machines will never fly” sort.↩
