Just a quick blog to link to a fantastic service offered, for free, by the University of California in Berkeley.
The famous University has been offering many of its courses online in both audio and video format since 2002, with courses from Fall/Autumn 2001. This service is subsidised by public donations, which can be made online at the webcast homepage.
For someone such as myself, who is not currently in a financial position that enables me to continue my studies, this service is of unbelievable worth.
A number of other American Universities also offer free course materials, such as MIT, Utah and Carnegie Melon. A good site with links can be found here. But Berkeley has by far the widest range and depth of course materials available.
So far there are only a few UK universities that offer lectures over iTunesU. However these tend to be public lectures and not actual course lectures, but it's a step in the right direction. I don't mean to suggest by any means that it's the duty of these universities to offer everyone free education, and in a sense the Americans are spoiling us. However it is the current education climate that frames Universities as private, profit-driven businesses and this is not really appropriate, given that knowledge cannot always be quantified in economic terms. Here is a recent issue that highlights the problem of quantifying the unquantifiable, and the intense feeling generated by it.
Plus, in giving away the audio and/or visual content of courses, Universities are not putting tutors under any extra pressure to grade thousands of people's work for free. In fact, offering lectures for free may, as has been shown with music downloading, actually increase university applications as potential students' appetites are whetted by those lectures.
This is one of those examples where the potential of the internet is gloriously apparent, and it's time that other institutions got on board.
