UC Berkeley Takes the Lead in the iTunes Game

| Category: UC Berkeley | |

This blog entry seems fairly appropriate today. This afternoon, Stanford and Berkeley play The Big Game, and who knows, anything can happen, but more than likely, it won’t be much of a contest. Stanford, with just one win this season, doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance against #21 Berkeley. Maybe the football gods will smile upon us. We’ll have to see.

Berkeley is also making a very strong showing on another front. The iTunes front. Over the past year, America’s leading universities (Stanford included) have made a strong push to record campus lectures — and, in some instances, courses — and put them on iTunes, making them free to the public. If you survey the various podcast collections (see the full list here), it becomes evident pretty quickly that Berkeley is playing in its own league right now. While most universities are recording one-off lectures (and not necessarily that many of them), Berkeley is recording full-fledged undergraduate courses, and a lot of them. And they’re often taught by the school’s pre-eminent faculty. The content overall is very good, although they don’t edit the material much, and so you have to suffer through basic housekeeping — where to buy the books, when to shut off your cell phones, how not to text message your friends during class, etc. But nonetheless, with a quick flick of your iPod wheel, you can jump forward and get engrossed in a pretty amazing class. Here is a full list of the courses currently available. Hopefully some other universities will soon start playing in Berkeley’s league.