Watch Educational Videos Offline with YouTube

It’s anoth­er good day for the open edu­ca­tion move­ment. As part of an exper­i­ment, YouTube has part­nered with a select num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties (Stan­ford, UC Berke­ley, Duke, and UCLA) to make lec­tures, cours­es and oth­er videos avail­able for free down­load. This gives edu­ca­tors and life­long learn­ers the free­dom to watch edu­ca­tion­al videos offline, when­ev­er and wher­ev­er they want, includ­ing air­planes or class­rooms with lim­it­ed con­nec­tiv­i­ty. The videos (all high-res­o­lu­tion mp4s) can be watched on any com­put­er loaded with Quick­Time and also on many portable devices, includ­ing new­er iPods. When I spoke with the YouTube team today, they flagged anoth­er perk: the videos are being dis­trib­uted under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, which means that you can reuse them under cer­tain non-com­mer­cial con­di­tions.

For some­one who has helped devel­op cours­es appear­ing in Stan­ford’s YouTube col­lec­tion, today’s news was cer­tain­ly wel­come. These cours­es are not cheap to devel­op, and we do it as a pub­lic ser­vice. So we’re always hap­py when we encounter new ways of get­ting the edu­ca­tion­al con­tent to a broad­er audi­ence. This new down­load capa­bil­i­ty does just that. It extends our reach just a lit­tle more, and it’s hard to quib­ble with that.

As a prac­ti­cal note, if you’re won­der­ing how to down­load the YouTube videos men­tioned above, here’s what to do. Find a video from Stan­ford, UC Berke­ley, Duke, or UCLA, look at the low­er left-hand cor­ner of the video, click the “Down­load this video” link, and you should be good to go.

Relat­ed Con­tent: