UC Berkeley Lectures Reach Global Audiences

Editor's note: This article is part of the Daily Cal's Semester in Review series for the month of November.

Hitchhiking through Azerbaijan, a teen stops at an Internet cafe to catch up on peace and conflict studies. In the Netherlands, a woman plays a recording of a geography lesson while fixing Christmas dinner. Scrubbing dishes in a crowded Berlin eatery, a man listens to a downloaded psychology lecture.

They are just a few of the people around the world who, like UC Berkeley students, have been downloading campus lectures in the form of webcasts, podcasts and YouTube videos for years. As the Internet’s role in education expands, professors face the unusual task of addressing an audience who will likely never lay eyes on the Campanile.

Professor Richard A. Muller, who teaches the class “Physics for Future Presidents,” said he has received thousands of e-mails from listeners in 48 states and 78 countries. They span all ages and occupations, including high school students and soldiers in Iraq. But almost all send the same message.

“They feel we’re being enormously generous in putting this on the Web,” said Muller, whose course examines applications of physics to current events. “They say there’s no way they could possibly get this education any other way.”

Mark Mayo, a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., said he has downloaded all the lectures from professor Marian Diamond’s integrative biology class, “General Human Anatomy,” onto his iPod.

“The entry-level biology work I’m doing now just isn’t giving me my fill, and I’m ready to dive right in,” said Mayo, 18, in an e-mail. “These lectures let me do that.”

Course webcasts have received more than 4 million views since webcast.berkeley.edu went live in 2001. Podcasted lectures went up on the Web site and Apple’s iTunes in April 2006. Most recently, UC Berkeley became the first campus to make full courses available on YouTube.

“Access to such classes is challenging here,” Yuko Harmegnies, a 32-year-old yoga instructor in Paris, France, said in an e-mail. “Having the webcast allows me to work the classes in with my schedule.”

Knowing your lecture has such a widespread audience can be daunting, said associate psychology professor Dacher Keltner, who has fielded e-mails from listeners in France, Egypt and India.

“It really amplifies that sense of contribution,” Keltner said. “On the other hand, your classroom is a lot bigger than it used to be, (you) start thinking, ‘Wow, ... be mindful of that.’”

Podcast listeners, however, miss some visual aspects of classes that sound alone cannot capture.

“We do PowerPoints, demonstrations, and they’re just left out of that,” said psychology professor John Kihlstrom.

But overall, many professors said the worldwide response has been one of the most rewarding experiences a teacher can hope for.

“People are just hungry out there,” Keltner said. “They are consuming knowledge at inspiring rates. They’re grateful to Berkeley for that service, and they really sense that Berkeley is up to something different here.”

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