Online video is no longer just fun and games: You might actually learn something. Berkeley Campus Shares 100 Introductory Courses.
The University of California at Berkeley lately said that it is teaming up with Google to deliver dozens of videotaped educational content, including lectures, seminars, speeches, special events symposia and even entire courses taught by some of the campus’ leading professors, directly to students and the general public via Google Video free of charge.
The university said it will be the first university with its own page on Google Video. More than 250 hours of video will be available on the site, Google Inc. and campus officials said in a statement.
The site includes six courses, as an initial offering, the university has put up a library of more than 250 hours of video footage for public viewing, as well as university lectures on arts, science, and global affairs. Most of it previously was not available online, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.
"We were interested in exploring our digital bridge and connecting those inside the campus with those outside the campus," said project manager Dan Mogulof, UC-Berkeley’s executive director of public affairs.
The best of college is now available, for free, without unpleasantries such as 8 a.m. classes, pop quizzes or term papers. “It’ iss click and play,” said Mogulof.
Easy to view and accessible to everyone, the Web site offers more than 100 introductory-level lectures in subjects such as physics, biology, chemistry, information systems and bioengineering. Viewers cannot earn credit, but they do not have to find a parking space either.
We are a public university, said Mogulof. We have fabulous faculty and incredible events. We want to share the wealth across the state, country and world.
Google has been collaborating with UC-Berkeley Public Affairs and Educational Technology Services since last summer, discussing new ways of making campus resources available to a wider audience, Mogulof said.
"We are both about leadership so we had a common language," he said. "We had many common values about making things available to the public."
The discussions were helped by the fact that the Google Video team is led by Philip Inghelbrecht, an alumnus of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Another ally was Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who received both his doctoral and master’s degrees from Berkeley.
“Google appreciates the opportunity to partner with progressive universities like UC Berkeley to make undiscovered lectures and entire courses available to our users,” Mr. Schmidt said in a statement. “UC Berkeley’s content—much of which was not easily accessible online—will enhance the comprehensive and diverse range of offerings by Google Video.”
A growing number of universities are providing audio and video recordings of campus events. But at most schools’, including Stanford and Santa Clara University, public access is limited to public lectures and sporting events. Complete course lectures are available only to registered students.
UC-Berkeley 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, a new, vast and often chaotic video marketplace that features everything from “I Love Lucy” reruns to amateur footage of car crashes and cats flushing toilets.
“We are the first, but we expect others to follow suit,” said Obadiah Greenberg, who helped design the project with UC-Berkeley’s Educational Technology Services.
The campus already offers free videotaped course lectures and special events through a campus-based Web site (http://webcast.berkeley.edu). But that site — which offers live and on-demand archives of lectures, including “administrivia” — requires installation of the program RealPlayer.
The Google Video project will be easier for those less technologically inclined — including legions of older Cal alumni, nostalgic for the intellectual inspiration of faculty members, said Mogulof. The Google site is more polished than the university’s Webcasts, with higher resolution and light editing.
The Google Video page will leverage Google’s Flash-based video player, which loads automatically and begins streaming video.
Physics and Search Engines
The Berkeley web page will include a half dozen courses from the university in their entirety, including “Physics for Future Presidents,” “Integrative Biology,” and “Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business,” which should be of particular interest to Mr. Schmidt.
In addition to the courses, the Google Video site includes the library’s Lunch Poems Series and guest lectures through the Graduate School of Journalism and the College of Engineering. The web page will also include video of campus events and symposia on subjects such as climate change and synthetic biology. More content will be added in the months ahead.
The Google site will soon include sports clips, a feature not found on the current Webcast system, said Obadiah Greenberg, product manager of UC-Berkeley’s Webcast site.
“Google Video presents us with a wonderful opportunity to share UC Berkeley’s amazing faculty with a global community of lifelong learners,” Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education, said in a statement.
She added that the university sees it as part of its “expanding digital bridge” to connect the public with the “intellectual riches of the campus.”
The Flash technology used by Google Video requires no additional applications and plays immediately, Greenberg said. This is better than the old system which required additional programs like RealPlayer, which would be downloading while accessing the content at the same time, leading to longer waits, he said.
The transfer of footage onto Google Video is labor-intensive, involving editing out all copyrighted materials from the tape, reformatting the clip for size and attaching a UC-Berkeley logo, Greenberg said. While the labor costs of adapting this technology are still unknown, Greenberg said the investment would bolster Berkeley’s reputation as a leading educational and research institution.
UC Berkeley has previously created podcasts of university courses that it has offered through Apple Computer’s iTunes U service. The university has been making courses available over the web since 2001 when its Educational Technology Services division began web-casting lectures and special events to students and the general public.
“(Educational Technology Services) has made the investment because we want to explore this new distribution channel,” he said.
Mogulof said there would be no changes to the current Webcast offerings, which are more extensive on the campus Webcast site than on Google Video.
"We would not do anything in this agreement that would hamper or have a negative impact on how students have access to multimedia tools," he said. "First and foremost, it is about serving the students."
Google appreciates the opportunity to partner with progressive universities like UC-Berkeley to make undiscovered lectures and entire courses available to our users, according to a press statement by CEO Eric Schmidt, a Cal graduate.
“UC-Berkeley’s content — much of which was not easily accessible online — will enhance the comprehensive and diverse range of offerings by Google Video,” he said.
At Stanford University, audio-taped course recordings are available on iTunes, but only to students. The university is planning to record and post several courses for its Web site, available to the public later this year or in January, said Scott Stocker, director of Web communications for Stanford.
Stanford is definitely exploring ways to make course content available on the Internet through a variety of distinct mechanisms, said Stocker. We have had some discussions with Google Video but have not made any agreement yet.
“New technologies emerge so quickly,” he said. “We are trying out a variety of them.”
While Stanford is researching the possibility of video coverage, Stocker said that he believes audio is often a more effective teaching tool than video.
“You can listen on mobile devices, untethered from the computer,” he said.
UC-Berkeley’s Greenberg said: “There is a move in higher education to provide open access. We look forward to more schools joining us.”
More than 250 hours of UC-Berkeley content is now available online at: http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.
Google Video is a comprehensive index of free and paid, user-generated and professional video content.