Congratulations to Yale for their open lecture video announcement. I discussed this in my 8/7/06 post Open educational video project brewing, and obviously they secured the $755k grant from Hewlett.
They’ve deservedly received a lot of press for this, including CNN, Chronicle of Higher Ed, PaidContent.org, etc.
The only thing that bugs me — and for which I’m obliged to set the record straight — is the claim that “Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures.” Obviously UC Berkeley has been doing this for 5 years, 10 if you include research. MIT OpenCourseWare has 25-30 videos online.
I really don’t want to get into “me too”-ism, or “mine’s bigger”, because the main story is too important and good for all of us.
What I think is a first, technically, as pointed out by InsideHigherEd.com, is that they are the first to focus on video within an open courseware model that includes selected course materials such as syllabii and transcripts in many languages. I don’t know if it’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) per se. I can certainly say that Berkeley follows an open courseware philosophy, though we currently don’t package it as such (we do provide links to the course website where course materials can be found).
Anyway, great news, and another leading University opens up and joins the fold.
We’ll keep plugging away at Berkeley where we put a premium on building scalable, open source systems to automate the capture and delivery of more and more courses. We’ll continue to figure out the best classroom infrastructure to have one- or two-camera shots with scan conversion of projector/computer/overhead display, staffed or unstaffed. We’ll continue to work with faculty and the Administration on intellectual property issues and championing open lecture audio and video internally and to the world. We’ll continue to find the most cost-effection solution for transcriptioning, close captioning, and the ability to search video against those captions. We’ll continue to move toward video formats that play on most computers, and produce downloadable media based on standards to ensure playback on a multiplicity of players (desktop, handheld media player, TV, phone). We’ll continue to use mechanisms to deliver PDFs of supplemental materials alongside audio and video. We’ll continue to find with ways to access opaque media including tools to “quote” video, indexing, and caption search. We’ll continue to explore ways to build community around our video including ratings, comments, and annotations such as notes and tags.
The hope is that we don’t continue to do this on a shoestring. We need to package these goals toward support for our efforts. Meanwhile, we have new friends in the space and I look forward to working together on the open lecture video movement.
September 24, 2006 at 11:02 pm |
Yes, I’ve noticed the way all the media stories about Yale’s announcement laud that institution as the “first” to offer free video courses, etc. Actually, I had no idea that Berkeley has been doing the same thing, so thanks for pointing this out in your post! I’m going to have to start making a list of all the institutions that offer free content so I can check them out when I have time….