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iPod University: YouTube's growing collection of university lectures

YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and raucous wedding processionals. But there's more to the site than pointless entertainment; there is a growing collection of university lectures available, including one by a Harvard Business School professor talking about consumer psychology in the recession, and Cambridge University historian David Starkey discussing the history of the British monarchy. Earlier this year YouTube launched a new home for education, YouTube EDU, which started as a volunteer project by company employees seeking a better way to aggregate educational content uploaded by U.S. colleges and universities. Last month the subsite went international, with 45 universities in Europe and Israel adding their content to the stream. "Around the world people can, from the comfort of their home, refresh their knowledge on a subject or explore other topics to better themselves intellectually," says YouTube EDU's Obadiah Greenberg. "I think that is rather profound."

One need not be a student to reap the benefits of higher education anymore. In addition to YouTube EDU, Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world's top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment. "There is a real appetite for content that is not just a sneezing-cat video," says Peter Bradwell, a researcher for the British academic think tank Demos. "There is a growing desire for intellectually stimulating material that is easily accessible." MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers free access to most of the school's course material and lectures on subjects like Anglo-American folk music and the behavior of algorithms. iTunes U provides free lectures, discussions, and conferences from schools like Oxford, Yale, and the French business institute HEC Paris. "The beauty of this platform is that it brings your material to a much wider audience," says Carolyn Culver, head of strategic communications for Oxford.

The democratization of higher education started in the 1990s when universities began looking to the Web to market their intellectual resources. In 1999, Germany's University of Tübingen became the first institution of higher learning to offer free lectures on the Web, and in 2002, MIT launched its OCW site. Now nearly 45 percent of visitors to the MIT site are what the school calls "self-learners." Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who died of cancer last year, tapped into this trend and became a Web star after he videotaped his final lecture, about achieving childhood dreams. To date, "The Last Lecture" has received 10.5 million hits...
Read entire article at Newsweek