The University of California at Berkeley is making audio and video recordings of many course lectures available free to anyone – on campus or off – through Apple Computer’s popular iTunes music store, campus officials announced last week.
The university has posted lectures from almost 30 courses, including seminars on computer science, psychology, and cyberculture, to the online store. Users of iTunes can download the lectures individually, or they can subscribe to semester-long podcasts, which transfer new sessions to their MP3 players when they connect those devices to their computers.
Berkeley’s project is the latest evidence of colleges’ growing interest in offering podcasts of course material – and in using iTunes to deliver those recordings. Several other institutions, including Stanford University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s dental school, have also struck deals with Apple to distribute course recordings on iTunes. But Berkeley is the only one of those universities distributing through iTunes to make podcasts of course lectures free to the public. (Stanford makes recordings of public lectures and sports information free through iTunes, but restricts course recordings to students.)
We’re reaching out to an entire worldwide community of self-learners,” said Obadiah Greenberg, product manager of Berkeley’s Webcasting service. “The walls of the ivory tower are coming down a bit.
Though Berkeley has only recently started to post lectures on iTunes, the university has been podcasting courses since last fall – when Mr. Greenberg tested the technology in his survey course, “Introduction to Computers.” Since then, campus technology officers expanded the ranks of podcasting professors by setting up tools that automatically record lectures, tag them, and post them online.
Professors have to show up on time, be sure to turn on their microphone and place it in a good spot, and that’s it,” said Mr. Greenberg.
Widening Audience
Until now the podcasts were archived only on a Web site for various types of course recordings that the university has operated for several years. Several other institutions – including Purdue University at West Lafayette – now maintain public podcasting sites of their own, and some of those sites have proved popular with students and off-campus Web surfers. Last year Berkeley’s Webcasting site received more than four million visits, said Mr. Greenberg.
Despite the success of their homegrown coursecasting site, officials at Berkeley say they expect the deal with Apple to broaden the podcasts’ reach to a much wider audience. Mr. Greenberg said Berkeley was drawn to iTunes by the software’s popularity, and by its interface – which allows users to organize podcasts in a list format.
Berkeley’s public face on iTunes – which can be reached through a new campus Web site – suggests that the project is an exercise in both pedagogy and public relations (http://itunes.berkeley.edu). In addition to the course recordings, officials have posted speeches and events, campus tours, and sports footage – including a video clip of “the Play,” a legendary last-second, lateral-filled kickoff return that led Berkeley’s football team to an improbable victory over Stanford in 1982.
More sports highlights are coming soon, according to Mr. Greenberg, and the university will post material from its historical archives over the summer. “This is something we’re really proud of,” he said of the project, “and I think people are excited about what it would mean if more schools started to do this.”
By Brock Read
The Chronicle of Higher Education Berkeley Offers Free Podcast of Courses Through iTunes