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College

CNET reports that UC Berkeley will now be offering free, online classes on YouTube. Before you get too excited, you aren’t going to be able to outsource your degree to the Internet quite yet but you might be able to learn something from a well respected set of professors.

Looking at the channel, you’ll notice a large variety of classes. Everything from Biology and Physics to a lecture on search technology by Sergey Brin and an Introduction to Non-Violence. Over 300 hours of video has been recorded, and more is on the way.

Virtual Classrooms

While Berkeley is the first college I can think of to release lectures on YouTube, they are certainly not the first to go digital with their course load. MIT, Vanderbilt, Caltech and UCLA all have a variety of taped lectures available online for public consumption. Many of these cover entire Semesters of classes.

Taking this one step further, virtual worlds are adding a layer of interactivity to online course work. Last Fall, Harvard offered a law class taught jointly on campus and in Second Life. The class materials and the classroom itself was made available to anyone who wanted to look at them during non-class hours.

New York Law School has also offered some classes on the virtual world There.com through their State of Play Academy program. Most of these classes were on digital culture and copyright law.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Now that it is so easy to disseminate information across the globe, I predict we will see more of these programs spring up across the web. It makes sense for the colleges, since their is little cost and since most of these programs are not for credit they aren’t cannibalizing their enrollment.

Watching a video lecture online is really no substitute for being there, but for people without access to these Universities, or those who want to brush up on some skills that have grown rusty, this is a fantastic service.

Follow the bouncing link for more classes that you can take classes online.

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