By Andrea Ford
UC Berkeley biologist Marian Diamond, a legendary lecturer.
“Do you know what the most complex mass of protoplasm on earth is?” Marian Diamond asks her students on the first day of anatomy class as she casually opens a flowery hatbox and lifts out a preserved human brain. “This mass only weighs 3 lb., and yet it has the capacity to conceive of a universe a billion light-years across. Isn’t that phenomenal?”
Diamond is an esteemed neuroanatomist and one of the most admired professors at the University of California, Berkeley. It would be a privilege for anyone to sit in on her lectures. And, in fact, anyone can. Videos of her popular course are available free online, part of a growing movement by academic institutions worldwide to open their once exclusive halls to all who want to peek inside. Whether you’d like to learn algebra from a mathematician at MIT, watch how to make crawfish étouffée from an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America or study blues guitar with a professor at Berklee College of Music, you can do it all in front of your computer, courtesy of other people’s money. In March, YouTube launched an education hub called YouTube Edu, dedicated exclusively to videos from the more than 100 schools–ranging from Grand Rapids Community College to Harvard Business School–that have set up official channels on the site. Liberated from the viral stew of pop-culture vlogs and silly cat videos, the collection highlights how much free education is out there. (See TIME’s special report on paying for college.)
Why is YouTube going high-brow? The answer involves revenue (the Edu hub has room for one or two ads on its home page), social relevance and perhaps a bit of rivalry. More than 170 schools offer content free to the public on Apple’s iTunes U, which originated in 2004 as a way for colleges to distribute content privately to their own students. The partnership has been a win-win: universities get a cost-cutting distribution tool, and Apple’s products become must-haves on campus.
The bigger question is, Why have colleges started posting all this stuff at no charge? “Schools have always wanted to have their own area where they could be among their peer institutions and help with the discovery of their content,” says Obadiah Greenberg, who leads the project at YouTube.
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