UC Berkeley Lectures go Online

The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it will deliver educational content, including course lectures and symposia, free of charge through Google Video.

UC Berkeley will be the first university with its own page on the Google Video Web site: http://video.google.com/ucberkeley, campus officials said. The campus is making more than 250 hours of content available to the public through Google Video.

Google Video is a comprehensive index of free and paid, user-generated and professional video content making it easy for users to discover, watch and share videos and for premium video producers to monetize and distribute their content.

“Google appreciates the opportunity to partner with progressive universities like UC Berkeley to make undiscovered lectures and entire courses available to our users,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, who received both his doctoral degree (1982) and master’s degree (1979) from UC Berkeley. “UC Berkeley’s content - much of which wasn’t easily accessible online - will enhance the comprehensive and diverse range of offerings by Google Video.”

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Visitors to the new UC Berkeley Web page will be offered a wide range of public events and cutting-edge symposia on everything from climate change to synthetic biology. The campus is set to add further content to the Google Video site in coming months.

‘Coursecasting’ is a growing trend in educational technology, enabling students and the general public to download audio and video recordings of class lectures to their computers and portable media devices. As with UC Berkeley’s agreement to deliver podcasts through Apple Computer’s iTunes U, the content made available via Google Video will consist mostly of recorded course lectures and special campus events.

Google Video will also make it much easier for the public to access content from UC Berkeley’s own Web sites by embedding Google Video’s proprietary player that uses the Flash plug-in to stream video. When viewers come to a UC Berkeley page, the video will play without the need to launch or download a special application.