14 DAY TRIAL // The University of California, Berkeley, announced that it has created a special YouTube channel to become the first university which shares full versions of its courses on a video sharing service. Obviously, all the clips are available free of charge and can be accessed by any visitor, no matter whether they own a YouTube account or not. According to the university, there are no less than 300 hours of courses, starting with bioengineering and ending with conflict studies.
"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life - academics, events and athletics - which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education.
There is an impressive number of YouTube channels available on Google's video sharing service but none of them provide full courses just like the Californian university. In fact, Berkeley is proud to be the first to bring this kind of video content on YouTube.
"YouTube's ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos," said Ben Hubbard, ETS co-manager of webcast.berkeley. "We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on YouTube and will continue to expand our offerings."
YouTube was acquired by Google in October 2006 when the Mountain View company paid $1.65 billion for the service which was supposed to become the leader of the market. Since then, a lot of companies, organizations or ordinary users created YouTube channels in order to share their content on the web. After the Viacom dispute was started, the YouTube representatives sustained the number of deals, which also created new channels on the page, was somewhere near 1,000 but since then lots of other firms have signed deals with YouTube.