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by Rebecca Kern
More and more universities across the country and throughout the world are contributing their full courses and materials, including video lectures, to their school websites as well as sites such as iTunes U and YouTube EDU. And the cost of these courses that are normally worth thousands of dollars in tuition? Zero.
These institutions of higher learning say they're sharing their courses online with no charge to fulfill their mission of making education more accessible to the broader public, not just to students and educators but to independent learners worldwide.
While users do not get academic credit for the free online courses, they now have access to an array of educational materials that were not previously available to the public.
The program automatically records video of faculty lectures in courses across all areas of study. Since its inception, webcast.berkeley has recorded and published around 520 video lectures, says Benjamin Hubbard, the site manager. Berkeley was the second university to publish content on iTunes U in 2006 and the first to publish on YouTube EDU in 2007. Since its inception, Hubbard says webcast.berkeley has received more 100 million views, in addition to 9.3 million views on iTunes U and 13.5 million on YouTube EDU.
Hubbard says webcast.berkeley viewed the partnerships with iTunes U and YouTube EDU as an extension of the university's ability to distribute content on platforms that students and the public were already using. "Our aim was to broaden the window of access to education," he says. "Our mission as a public university is to make this educational content available to folks from all walks of life."
These online educational courses can also reach an even more international audience with the help of automatic captions, combining Google's automatic speech recognition with YouTube's captioning system. The YouTube captioning can be translated into over 40 languages, Hubbard says.
Also in 2001,
Not only does the
So what impacts do these free online courses have on the classroom experiences in universities?
Hubbard says that at Berkeley, he has heard professors who post their video lectures online say that students in the classroom are engaging in a different way. Instead of being buried in their texts and taking notes, the professors say they can actually see students' faces listening and absorbing the lecture. The professors say this is because the students know they can go back and watch the video lectures later if they want to review material. Kleiner says she may assign her own online video lectures as homework and then incorporate the lectures into class discussions. She also says that thanks to the liberal licensing of the online courses, she has seen educators around the world repurposing the content to teach in their own classrooms.
These free online educational resources are also helping to break down the financial and geographical barriers that can limit access to education. "At some level, these courses are helping to democratize knowledge," says Dan Colman, the associate dean and director of the Stanford Continuing Studies program. "Suddenly, knowledge that was fairly specialized is available to anyone with Internet access. It doesn't matter how much money you have or where you live; it's accessible now."
The Down-Low on Online Downloading Sites:
This
multimedia file-sharing site contains more than 250,000 educational
video and audio files from more than 600 universities, including
This education-specific YouTube channel created in October 2007 provides more than 60,000 videos from over 300 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and India, according to Obadiah Greenberg, the strategic partner manager at YouTube. He says the mission of the site is "to facilitate the distribution of open educational resources to a worldwide audience."
Founded by
Dan Colman of the Stanford Continuing Studies program founded the site in 2006 to provide free audio books, online courses, movies, language lessons, and E-books. The site has more than 250 courses from institutions of higher education around the globe.
© U.S. News & World Report
Education: Free Online Course Offerings Grow in Abundance and Popularity | Rebecca Kern
© U.S. News & World Report