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UC Berkeley puts hundreds of academic lectures on YouTube

Ever felt like learning about physics from a professor at UC Berkeley? You may …

The University of California at Berkeley has joined the ranks of YouTube partners by providing a number of full course lectures and other special events through YouTube. The school announced the availability of its own YouTube channel yesterday, with over 300 hours of video available on YouTube. This includes lectures on bioengineering, physics, chemistry, peace and conflict studies, and other topics. There's even a lecture by Google co-founder Sergey Brin on search engines.

Berkeley says that it is the first university to make full courses available through the popular video-sharing site. It is, however, not the first time it has delved into digital distribution with its lectures. The university has been offering webcasts of its courses and events online since 2001 and added podcasts in 2006. It also offers a number of audio lectures through iTunes U on topics such as art, history, computer science, mechanical engineering, and legal studies.

In fact, when it comes to offering audio downloads or webcasts of lectures, a number of universities are already on board. Several colleges and universities host their own sites for students to access lectures, and Stanford, Yale, MIT, Arizona State University, DePaul, Texas A&M, and Duke are just a few of the universities that offer free podcasts through iTunes U to anyone who wants them.

But not all universities have been sure about how to handle making lectures open to the public. A North Carolina State professor attempted to offer his lectures online for $2.50 per download last fall—part of which went to the download site he used, and the rest went toward editing costs of the audio files. The school's administration wasn't fond of the idea, however, and asked him to suspend the practice while it developed a comprehensive policy for the use of this kind of intellectual property. A year later, it's not clear whether the university has yet to make a decision on the matter, although it does offer audio downloads of select seminars through its web site.

For those that have already dived headfirst into digital distribution of their lectures, however, a move to YouTube or some other video-sharing site seems like the next logical step. "YouTube's ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of Berkeley's webcast program, in a statement. "We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on YouTube and will continue to expand our offerings."

Channel Ars Technica