Cal-Berkeley offers full courses on YouTube - but not for credit

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

You don't have to be a UC Berkeley student to be educated like one.

UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.

UC Berkeley began experimenting with broadcasting classes online as early as 1995 and joined dozens of other colleges last year in distributing free podcasts through Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store. Now the school hopes to attract an even larger audience by establishing a dedicated channel on one of the most-trafficked sites on the Internet.

"YouTube is an extension of our reach," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley.edu, the program that gathers the lectures and makes them available online. "We feel strongly as a public institution that we should be providing a window into the intellectual riches of our university."

The future of college is here.