From the Chronicle:
More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube, and this week the popular video service unveiled a new section that brings together all of that campus content in one area.
It had been difficult to find college lectures on YouTube, since they are generally far less popular than the site’s humorous and outrageous clips, and so they do not show up in lists of the most viewed videos on the site. Although YouTube has long had an education category, it relies on users who post videos to decide whether to categorize their videos as educational, and as a result the definition of education is very broad. The new YouTube EDU page includes only material submitted by colleges and universities.
Spencer Crooks, a spokesman for YouTube, said in a statement that the site now features complete lectures for some 200 full college courses. “Subjects range from computer science to literature, biology to philosophy, history, political science, psychology, law, and much more,” he said. “You can search within YouTube EDU to find videos on topics of interest.”
I searched for Michael Sandel, and his legendary lecture on justice aren’t there. Yet.
{ 27 comments }
engels 03.30.09 at 4:09 pm
I came across a Harvard site a while ago (while nosing around Martin O’Neill’s web page I believe) which gave me the impression that they were planning to put Sandel’s lectures up there in the near future. All that was there for the time being though was a movie-style trailer with clips of Sandel being inspirational to fresh-faced Harvardees…
tom bach 03.30.09 at 4:17 pm
Sandel on Justice: http://post.harvard.edu/sandel/
is this the one you meant?
Paul 03.30.09 at 4:33 pm
I’ll stick with Open University…Academics on YouTube ? Well it had to happen…
Bloix 03.30.09 at 6:18 pm
Anyone want to speculate on what this means for the future of higher education?
(O)CT(O)PUS 03.30.09 at 9:10 pm
Lectures on YouTube
Ship sails tomorrow
The shooting of the lions was deplorable.
Anthony 03.31.09 at 12:05 am
#4 – the return of the correspondence course, in modern dress?
Bloix 03.31.09 at 12:39 am
No, seriously – won’t this eventually make the large lecture course obsolete? Why would any university (especially any public university) pay a lecturer to teach intro anything to a hall of 300 students, when thousands can watch one person teach it on YouTube?
Righteous Bubba 03.31.09 at 12:42 am
Oh. I thought you were invoking HH.
vivian 03.31.09 at 1:16 am
What a great idea – will there be a CrookedTimber channel? (yes, yes, you’re
allmostly too modest to consider yourselves worthy, just upload each other’s talks instead.)Maurice Meilleur 03.31.09 at 2:03 am
‘Make’ the large lecture course obsolete?
engels 03.31.09 at 2:41 am
Tom – Yes, good spot, but I now see from your link that you are only permitted to watch the great man in action if you are an alumnus of Harvard. They aren’t taking any risks with this justice stuff apparently…
Matt 03.31.09 at 3:05 am
_Why would any university (especially any public university) pay a lecturer to teach intro anything to a hall of 300 students, when thousands can watch one person teach it on YouTube?_
It’s not a complete answer, but one thing to consider is that students often complain, and often rightly, about taking lectures in huge lecture halls like this. And already, in some places, the lecture is live-cast into another giant lecture hall where students watch on “live” TV. This is really unpopular. Now, for some, the web version will have advantages- you can watch when you want, if you get tired you can pause, there are no restrictions on food or drink, and you don’t even need to wear pants. But for others there will be big draw-backs. A set schedule helps people go and pay attention to things that are good for them but that they might otherwise put off. “Being there” sometimes helps people pay attention, and so on. And, with the youtube version you lose even more chance for actual interaction and discussion. I think that, over all, it’s a pretty good thing to put lectures on the internet, and I’m not as pessimistic about distance learning as, say, Hubert Dryfus is. But, I think it cannot fully replace the sort of learning one gets with real interaction, and even beyond that there are worries and drawbacks that must be considered.
MikeZ 03.31.09 at 4:22 am
To piggy back on what Matt (#12) said: I was an Phil. undergrad major at Berkeley, so I took a whole bunch of courses with Hubert Dreyfus. I always treated his podcasts as supplementary to his lectures, rather than as a substitute. I found that if I only listened to the podcasts, I couldn’t really focus on what Dreyfus was talking about. Whereas if I went to the lecture, took notes, and went back to the podcasts as review, or to visit a point for clarification, I found that approach to be very helpful.
Plus, I often found myself distracted while listening to the podcasts, because I would be on a computer, and therefore tempted to do other things, thinking that I could multi-task. But that wasn’t really the case, and I found that I really needed to just listen to the podcasts and do nothing else, which was pretty much like going to the lecture in person.
So I’m somewhat skeptical about the merits of only using interactive mediums, but I definitely think that as supplements, these new opportunities will go along with the traditional lecture very well.
ejh 03.31.09 at 6:51 am
The history of Western philosophy in under five minutes
Chris Williams 03.31.09 at 7:17 am
Will this make conventional higher education obsolete? No. Trust me on this one – I work for the UK’s Open University (best university on the planet), and while delivery of factual material in lecture format is important and useful, there’s a lot more to successful education than that. Also, video lectures don’t mimic the functionality of the real thing: if you’re in the room, you can moderate what you’re saying to the audience. This is not possible via YouTube.
Plug alert -> I understand that there’s a lot more half-decent educational material on itunes, much of which was put there by my colleagues.
Slocum 03.31.09 at 12:02 pm
Anyone want to speculate on what this means for the future of higher education?
On its own — not much. Lectures are not particularly good ways to learn about any topic, and so neither are recorded lectures. I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a text-searchable, skimmable transcript? Better yet, wouldn’t you rather have the lecturer’s written works? Better yet, wouldn’t you rather learn the subject from a variety of sources than a series of lectures (or articles) from a single source?
But that’s all really irrelevant. Yes, you can certainly learn almost any subject for free from the comfort of your desk chair with only the investment of your time and effort — and that’s been true for years. But you can’t get official credit for such knowledge unless you pick up and move and spend several years (and many, many thousands of dollars) sitting through the lectures. Of course, you don’t actually have to sit there pay — you can usually play hooky without penalty. But the many thousands of dollars are never optional.
We don’t need new, efficient, low-cost methods of learning — we have those. What we need are new, efficient, low-cost methods of earning credit and degrees. But if that happens, it will only be after a long, tough fight I think. Universities are rich and powerful and will do what is necessary to protect their degree-granting cartel.
Chris Williams 03.31.09 at 12:50 pm
Slocum’s right. But there are very definite limits to the extent that assessment can be made low cost. It involves a large number of transactions that have to be quality-assured (in the ‘get everything right, all the time’ sense of the term, not the ‘spout management theory’ sense).
That’s assuming that you can pile tuition high and sell it cheap, which is a big assumption. We’ve been trying for decades, and have come to the conclusion that you can’t: there’s an irreduceable amount of human interaction, with a moderately clever, educated and motivated human, that is necessary for educating most people to degree level.
Course materials can be produced in a Fordist fashion: they are fundamentally a product which is subject to economies of scale. Tuition and assessment can be streamlined, but they remain services, which are not.
engels 03.31.09 at 1:12 pm
Chris, right, but isn’t the most obvious demand just that testing should be uncoupled from teaching? If I think I can pass Harvard or OU’s exams (for example) why shouldn’t I be allowed to have a crack at them (if I pay) and get a degree if I pass? What would be the objection to that?
Slocum 03.31.09 at 1:13 pm
But there are very definite limits to the extent that assessment can be made low cost.
Any undergrad course ever taught in large lecture format could be handled with free instruction and low-cost assessment. In some cases (where the quality of writing needed to be judged), the assessment would be more expensive, but certainly it would be dramatically cheaper than current tuition costs. And most upper level undergrad courses not taught in large classes could also be subject to standardized assessment. What possible critical need for a human instructor could there be, say, in a 400 level Linear Algebra course?
And the current assessment system really sucks. Grading is idiosyncratic (on might say capricious), varying from instructor to instructor, department to department, university to university. There really aren’t even any attempts at standardization. Which is why, for example, there is a need for the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT (which, notably, are all scored at low cost).
salient 03.31.09 at 1:18 pm
Lectures are not particularly good ways to learn about any topic, and so neither are recorded lectures.
I disagree entirely. Many people obtain information better through verbal channels. (As well, many people, who are neither blind nor stuck in a car, learn from books on tape.)
I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a text-searchable, skimmable transcript? Better yet, wouldn’t you rather have the lecturer’s written works? Better yet, wouldn’t you rather learn the subject from a variety of sources than a series of lectures (or articles) from a single source?
No, no, and yes. I already have a skimmable resource: textbooks on the topic. The lecturer’s written works are usually not on the topic of study per se, so they’re not a good resource for the course topic. They’re also written to a highly specialized audience. And yes, more (and more diverse) sources is a good thing, which is why I’d want a lecturer presenting material to me in addition to the texts.
Chris Williams 03.31.09 at 2:07 pm
To a first approximation, Engels, what you’d pay (assuming that you are a UK citizen who has not yet got a degree) to do an OU course (£500 for 60 points, more or less) probably covers the cost of assessment, administration, and an irreduceable minimum of overheads. It’s about 40% of the total cost – the rest of which* is accounted for by course production, tuition, and other overheads. That bit, 60%, is pretty much equivalent to the grant from HEFCE that we get for every student who gets 2/3 of the way through the course.
So, as far as the UK government’s concerned, there’s nothing to stop you at all from merely paying for the exams. You’ll note that, unlike Harvard, we have no entry qualification whatsover for our undergraduate awards. I told you it was the best university on the planet. I imagine, though, that we couldn’t put on an ‘exam-only’ track this cheaply without the economies of scale offered to us by the fact that other people who want course materials and tuition are also paying their fees.
Slocum, I don’t recognise the problem that you describe about erratic assessment. In an industrial-scale university system (ie the OU) , lots of the expense is the systems for monitoring the assessment structure, the tuition, and the examining so as to make it consistent. We’ve got, like, computers and stuff, to help us but again there’s a minimum number of clever experts who have to be in the loop to make it work.
*NB I am not quite pulling these numbers out of thin air – I have a reasonable idea about how many person-hours and what kind of infrastructure are involved. But they are guesses, so please don’t use them if you’re writing a paper on education accounting. Not if you want to pass.
Chris Williams 03.31.09 at 2:15 pm
PS The more I think about the line ‘assessment in HE is erratic – so let’s make it cheaper!’ the less convincing it sounds. Those ‘low cost’ admissions tests are all generic: they don’t attempt to test degree-level knowledge of a specific discipline.
harry b 03.31.09 at 2:30 pm
I think you (Chris) and slocum are talking at cross-purposes. You (Chris) don’t recognise the problem about assessment, because you don’t have experience of it (in the UK, right?). Slocum’s take on the practices in US universities is just exactly right. Its a different world. (In a public lecture I once proposed adopting the grading practices I am familiar with from the UK, and half the audience looked thrilled, as if I was some sort of visionary genius, while the others, probably rightly, just shook their head implying that I’d have a better chance of passing through the eye of a camel).
engels 03.31.09 at 3:16 pm
Chris, thanks for the figures which are interesting. I should say though that my point was not about cost but about access. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned either Harvard (US grading practices) or OU (open enrollment). What I had in mind was a more typical UK university which selects a very limited number people for tuition (purportedly based on their potential for academic achievement) and awards degrees to the majority of them based on performance in final exams. In this case I wonder why the two functions shouldn’t be decoupled so that someone who wasn’t admitted should be permitted to take the exams anyway and get a degree if successful (perhaps after receiving tuition elsewhere). Reasons for allowing this include fairness to people who lose out (systematically or otherwise) in the original admissions process, increasing competitive pressures on the quality of university teaching, and giving universities and the public a source of (potentially somewhat embarassing) feedback on the functioning of university admissions systems.
Righteous Bubba 03.31.09 at 5:06 pm
I’m with you, but is the UK degree also an indicator to an employer that X years of work were embarked upon – or X ECTS credits accumulated as a measure of study – rather than just a series of exams taken?
Slocum 04.01.09 at 2:47 pm
Brad DeLong has a post on the topic.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/newspapers-and-colleges.html#comments
His conclusion?
“Put it this way: The printed book should have killed the university. Once you have Gutenberg, the original rationale for the lecture course is gone–yet universities survived and flourished. We need to have a much stronger sense of why universities survived the coming of the printed book before we can convince ourselves that they will not survive the coming of the internet.”
Hmmm. Why am I reminded of DeLong’s suggestion, a few years ago, that Bay Area real-estate was probably not overvalued because of the ever-increasing desire to live in coastal California? In that case, I think his status as a Bay Area property owner may have clouded his judgement, and in this case, I think his job as a university professor might be having the same biasing effect.
Why is the Internet different that the printed book? Where to start? How about with the fact that printed books were readily accessible but were rare and expensive And that they had no capacity to reproduce sound and video (and limited capacity even to reproduce images). But the most obvious and important difference is that books are one-way and offer no capacity for interaction, whereas the internet creates the capacity for (near zero-cost) interaction with other students and scholars (across the globe). And keep in mind that for most the of history of universities, they educated only a very small fraction of the population–a university education was not a near-universal requirement (and expense).
But even so, let’s remember that there were times that it was possible to obtain professional certification outside of universities (Abe Lincoln studied and practiced law without ever attending law school). Here, in advice to a prospective lawyer, he describes his own studies:
Who closed off that path to the practice of law and why? I don’t know the history, but I would expect to find, at the bottom, powerful people with a vested interest in increasing the cost and difficulty of becoming a lawyer. I would expect to find the fingerprints of law schools and bar associations — the law schools in order to make their degrees mandatory, and the bar associations to restrict competition and raise fees.
We see this pattern over and over and over again — professions seeking to restrict competition by using the power of the state to impose costly, time-consuming credentialing and licensing requirements — sometimes to absurd levels:
“Although African-style hair braiding requires no on-site cutting or washing, Cornwell would have to pay more than $7,000 to attend a state-approved beauty school in order to receive the proper license.”
http://www.reason.com/news/show/27551.html
The good guys won in that case, but they had to engage in expensive litigation, and this good result is certainly not universal. So I think Kevin Carey (whom Delong links to) has it right when he says:
“…universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation.”
Still, I think there is some hope for change here, and it starts with the growing awareness that much of the instruction that universities offer undergraduates is both an absurd anachronism and an unconscionable ripoff. And with both government support for state universities and family capacity to pay tuition under strong pressure, there is incentive for change.
Bloix 04.01.09 at 9:30 pm
#23 – Harry, you would be doing a public service to your American audience by writing a short post comparing grading practices in the US and the UK.
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