Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.14.10 | Jeffrey Young has a great piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the promise and potential pitfalls of recording and sharing academic lectures online.

According to the latest Campus Computing Survey, 28 percent of colleges have a strategic plan to provide coursecasting equipment so that lectures can be broadcast to sites like YouTube, while another 35 percent are currently working on a plan. Young continues:

A vast majority of the classes recorded on college campuses are available only to registered students in those courses as a study aid, say experts who track the trend. At Purdue University, for instance, just 24 of the 92 courses now recorded are open to the public through the university’s ambitious coursecasting program.

Though several colleges run such open-courseware projects, in which they make syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and other materials free, most of those efforts are still small, and only a few of the open courses include full lecture videos.

And though hundreds of colleges have set up channels on YouTube or reserved sections of Apple’s iTunes Store devoted to material from colleges, the majority of the public content on those sites consists of marketing material or sports highlights rather than course lectures.

It’s worth noting that the famous aphorism “Information wants to be free” is part of a longer quote from Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog editor who is also a computer pioneer. The other part of what he said, at a conference in 1984, was “Information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

The next few years could be crucial for determining how this balance tips for lecture videos, which can be produced for next to nothing but remain highly valuable in the eyes of professors and administrators.

Regardless of the ambitions, some professors will never feel completely at ease with the camera rolling; they might simply be too shy, or they might be concerned about theft of intellectual property or that their remarks will be taken out of context (here’s an earlier piece Young did about professors caught on tape).

But as students are now encouraged, starting at younger ages, to share their learning experiences with public audiences—via blogs, wikis and podcasts, for example—it’s likely that teachers will also be expected to participate more openly. The best example a teacher can provide is to hit “record.”