May 11, 2010
The University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) routinely records a variety of faculty lectures every semester and publishes it on the internet since 2001. The recording was done with audio and video. This kind of regular publication of content for audio / video called a podcast.
Especially for UC Berkeley, they named it For those who are interested can go directly to the home page and download the lecture you want. Bids his courses – average only at the beginning of the semester, but there are quite varied subjects: molecular biology, politics, communication sciences, physics and even philosophy. I myself just listening to lectures so far biology, but the professor deserved thumbs up. They could deliver lectures with a solid and clear in time – average one hour, and some even have a can communicate with a few jokes to entertain. If you use iTunes or another program that can download podcasts directly, you can sign up to RSS feeds from the relevant subjects and new content will be downloaded instantly once they are published.
UC Berkeley is not the only university that opened classroom content to the world. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is also having the program Open Course Ware (OCW). But unlike such webcast.berkeley where we participate in the lecture hall, the concept of OCW is a publication of the material – material that used to lecture at MIT. Some courses provide lectures in audio recordings and videos, but most only provide the syllabus, the topic of each meeting, and schedule of activities during the lecture course. This is still informative for you – you who are wondering what are used in the classroom one of the best universities in the world can now know.
Still want to learn more? You can also do it in the iTunes U program run by Apple. The iTunes U is a collection of various free educational materials, such as college lecturers or seminars with guest speakers from various universities carried out by Apple. Here the choice is much more diverse universities: Stanford, Yale, to Cambridge University. So did his courses choices: from architecture, engineering, until the study of film and Japanese kanji. To browse the available courses, you need to run iTunes on your computer and open this link. A collection of lectures from different universities can also be found in the Academic Earth. What makes it different from others is all material existing on the site are videos and can watch the stream directly.
However, you may ask, what’s all this for me? Google and Wikipedia is enough to answer my curiosity. Indeed, for short and quick information you can rely on the site. You may be able to know what genome is, what the mesoderm is, or how the CPU circuit works. But did you know the importance of examining the genome? What is the importance of studying the mesoderm? You can look it up again of course, on Google and Wikipedia, but in the end you get is a collection of facts – facts which are sometimes difficult to put together into one complete story. This is the advantage to follow lectures – lecture: the context of the story intact. To understand one issue, you need to understand it as a whole, not just a piece or two pieces of the facts only.
By listening to the experts – experts in respective fields deliver lectures, you will get the context of the story more easily. Just try to compare you to browse the internet for an hour looking for information on prokaryotic gene expression control or you listen to lectures on the same topic for an hour.
In addition, you also have more freedom with this way of learning. If you have a portable audio or video player, you can take lectures – lectures on top wherever you go. A bit like carrying a book, but you do not have to worry about a heavy luggage. You can listen in the car when the traffic jams, or when you are on campus waiting for your friend to come. Easy is not it?
Well, wait no more. All materials are free. All you need is the willingness (and an adequate internet connection of course).
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.