Fall 2006 webcast.berkeley launched. Happy 5th birthday!

webcast.berkeley Courses for Fall 2006 launched today. Happy 5th birthday webcast.berkeley!

What a line-up: 44 coursecasts total, a record. 25 of these are webcasts (streaming video) and 32 are podcasts (14 are both webcasts and podcasts).

For webcasts we’ve got our super gateway classes including General Astronomy, General Biology, Intro to Chemistry, the core Computer Science series, General Human Anatomy, General Psychology, and Physics for Future Presidents. This term all of these are taught by our most popular faculty for these subjects.

We’ve got some incredible first-time webcasts, too. Pamela Samuelson and Mitch Kapor teach Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives. Just today we were joined by Introduction to Statistics. Finally, there’s Introduction to Nonviolence.

There’s also five Electrical Engineering courses, always our top-rated webcasts because of a ravenous audience in Asia. What’s great about these is that their usual funding source was pulled this semester, so these were paid for by the EE/CS department or from the faculty’s own grants.

Now let’s talk about podcasts. To quote Dave Winer from last term: “Look at all the podcasts at UC-Berkeley.”

Our #1 rated course (European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present) is back and in a great facility with much better audio. Last term’s podcast of this course has almost 30 customer reviews right now on iTunes. I’m working now to get this one webcasted as well.

Lots of other incredible new courses podcasting for the first time: Literature in English (finally an English, my major!), History of Information with Paul Duguid, Earthquakes in Your Backyard, a bunch of Molecular Cell Bios and Mechanical Engineerings, four Psychologys including Human Emotion, and many others.

We actually would have had six more courses podcasting, but a delayed network upgrade in two buildings prevented it. Also, our Electrical Engineering courses opted to only webcast, I guess realizing that audio-only wouldn’t cut it. That’s fair.

Today was a wild crescendo as everything came together. Lots of details, any of which could make or break our first day of classes: Gave a spiel to our student AV staff about do’s and don’ts for recording for webcast.berkeley, posted a checklist in the equipment checkout room to make sure all podcasters get their microphones, sent wiki documentation on using M-Audio portable MP3 recorders to folks podcasting from rooms where we can’t automatically record them, finally got written permission for use of copyrighted imagery in Marian Diamond’s course (remember that?), helped Statistics secure funding to webcast, made sure the data in our automated capture/delivery is ship-shape, our engineer got the latest podcast devices online, our sysadmin put a second encoder to expedite our three non-automated webcasts, and I had a great talk with someone writing an article on webcast.berkeley and Berkeley on iTunes U for our alumni newsletter that reaches some 100,000 people.

Did all of this have to happen in one day? No, but this is what happens when there’s a ton of energy around a project, when everyone involved is dedicated, kick-ass, and amped for the new school year.

This is the year for webcast.berkeley. Our staff loves it, students love it, faculty love it, and their departments love it. Alumni, the podcast community, other universities, and a worldwide audience of self-learners love it. The University administration loves it, and I believe this year — with webcast.berkeley, Berkeley on iTunes U, and other burgeoning initiatives — it will be embraced and promoted by them like never before.

I love it, but I’m partial. What’s not to love? Over the past 5 years we’ve built an entire ecosystem around webcasting and now podcasting. It’s completely transformed our AV business. It has become an incredible tool not only for teaching and learning, but also as a powerful way to bring the world to UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley to the world.

I’ve got to give thanks to the vision of Professor Larry Rowe who laid the groundwork for all of this 10 years ago. His pioneering work with the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC) not only recognized the power of online video but who developed the automated capture/delivery system known then as the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System (BIBS). His work not only gave us the lead in technology, but also fostered a culture of open courseware among faculty. Afterall, the technology really only delivers the teachings of these stars. I like to think that we’ve carried his vision forward and brought it far beyond what he anticipated.

We started in Fall 2001 with 12 courses and 84,000 views. Last term we had 3 times as many courses, 2.5 million views, and 10-million hits on our podcast MP3s. We were in the iTunes Podcasts homepage as “New & Notable” three times, and one course made it to #25 in the Top 100 podcasts.

webcast.berkeley has grown into a community. We have inspired other institutions to coursecast, demonstrated how to do so economically with our automated capture/delivery system, turned on a world of learners, and are slowly but surely making the case for open access educational audio and video.

Yes, today was a good day. And it will be even better when classes start on Monday.