Cal Berkeley puts lectures on YouTube

This was reported in the last two weeks, but in case you missed it, the University of California Berkeley has started uploading lectures to YouTube. In and of itself, this probably isn’t too earth-shattering, since you can already find many educational lectures at iTunesU, PodClass, (here’s a Faceback App Tutorial Video from my new friend, Gary Gil, who I met at the Graphing Social conference last week!) and LearnOutLoud, to name a few. (Update — another TechCrunch post referred to HowStuffWorks.com being acquired by Discovery — another example of great edutainment content.  Update2 — fantastic post by Andy Kessler on online education possibilities).

But, given the size of Berkeley and the likely bureaucracy that they had to fight through to get approval to get these lectures posted, I think it warrants more coverage by those of us who are trying to transform the way people learn new things — while we (the TeachStreet staff) are probably more excited about in-person, face-to-face learning, we concede that there’s a time and place for all kinds of learning experiences, and the quality of professors at Berkeley is likely about as good as it gets.

Since these lectures are fairly unedited, you’ll need to be prepared for some very real classroom experiences (i.e. a bit boring, not perfect sound, and some long moments of empty sound!), but I listed through two videos, and actually really enjoyed them — I’ve included them both below for your enjoyment.

Physics 10 — Physics for Future Presidents (the beginning 5 minutes of this is great… he relates how a meteor appearance in a Toyota Tacoma Truck Ad actually does serve some educational value!

SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life: Sergey Brin, of Google fame, guest lectures!