aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Professors as YouTube stars

Regular readers know I’m a fan of lectures. When I hear people (typically older people) pooh-poohing lectures online, I think that they just don’t get it. I want my content raw, preferably with the right to remix it as I please.

The Chronicle says “even YouTube was surprised” by the popularity of lectures:

YouTube itself wants to be a venue for academe. In the past few months, several colleges have signed agreements with the site to set up official “channels.” The University of California at Berkeley was the first, and the University of Southern California, the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and Vanderbilt University soon followed.

It remains an open question just how large the audience for talking eggheads is, though. After all, in the early days of television, many academics hoped to use the medium to beam courses to living rooms, with series like CBS’s Sunrise Semester. which began in 1957. Those efforts are now a distant memory.

And a wrong-headed comparison. Lectures are long tail content if ever there was such a thing. YouTube denies being surprised by the popularity:

[S]ome lectures on Berkeley’s channel scored 100,000 viewers each, and people were sitting through the whole talks. “Professors in a sense are rock stars,” Mr. Hochman concludes. “We’re getting as many hits as you would find with some of the big media players.”

YouTube officials insist that they weren’t surprised by the buzz, and they say that more colleges are coming forward. “We expect that education will be a vibrant category on YouTube,” said Obadiah Greenberg, strategic partner manager at YouTube, in an e-mail interview. “Everybody loves to learn.”

Says one professor, “For a teacher, you couldn’t ask for anything better.” I couldn’t agree more.