UC Berkeley Puts Free Lectures on YouTube

A new alternative to paying $28,000 per year for an education: going to class online for free. Just don't expect to print out a degree when you're done.

For college students who have ever wasted time cruising for videos on YouTube when they should have been studying, there’s now an easy compromise: going to class on YouTube. The University of California at Berkeley became the very first college to offer lectures on YouTube when it announced the UC Berkeley channel on Wednesday.

YouTubers can now attend 300 lectures on everything from biology to nonviolence, completely free of charge. The video lessons aren’t intended explicitly for enrolled students – UC Berkeley wants to share them with whoever finds the content interesting. “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, manager of special events and video services, in a statement.

UC Berkeley has long been ahead of the curve in offering classroom content online. It opened a local site to broadcast courses and campus events back in 2001. Podcasts became available through the side in April 2006, and the university continued to add to its offerings, delivering 3,500 hours of content in 2007.