Berkeley lectures as podcasts

One has to wonder how many more years traditional brick-and-mortar universities are going to be the rule rather than the exception. I've never been a fan of for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix or DeVry. The pursuit of knowledge is the chief purpose of a university; if you taint that with the necessity of running a profitable business, the priorities get muddled, and administrators start making compromises--first with the number of instructors, then with the quality of instructors, resources, numbers of students, et cetera ad infinitum.

But the latest trend seems to be a move towards highly competitive, quality schools like Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford making recorded lectures and other materials available for free--an altruistic gesture, to be sure, and certainly one appreciated by myself and many others, but also one that portends greater trends in the coming years.

Right now these materials are free, and in the cases linked above, likely to remain so. I'm betting that over the next few years, we'll see many other universities following suit, but restricting access to the materials. Some will probably be made publicly available, especially from public universities, but I imagine most will be accessible through the kind of portal most schools already have for their students. In combination with existing online courses, this may well change the nature (and please god, the COST) of attending higher education. Making it through an entire semester while attending a minimum of classes is already something of a rite of passage for many freshmen; if lectures were made available online, it could easily become the rule.

Keep in mind of course that many schools already offer online courses that never require a student to see the inside of a classroom--professors offer office hours and answer questions via email. Students beginning school today are almost guaranteed to take at least one or two classes this way. The greatest advantage of these classes is also its greatest weakness. By taking students out of the classroom, they often flounder while trying to grasp the course material without benefit of a guide, and while their professors may make themselves available, students often cannot come to a professor's office because of work or other obligations. Recorded lectures may well bridge that divide, giving students the guided tour of course material, but on their own time.

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