TED

Technology, Education, Design

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a non-profit organization that holds an annual, invitation-only conference for high-profile businessmen, politicians, designers, and cultural figures. Its exclusivity is offset by its website, which freely posts lectures/presentations from its conferences in Monterey, California (and more recent international locations). Founded in 1984, TED Talks became available online in June 2006. In a bid to make its content accessible to non-English speakers, TED also features a TED Open Translation project, which at the time of its website launch, contained over 300 translations completed by volunteer translators in roughly 40 languages. The organization also awards a prize, sponsors a fellows program, and hosts TEDx, a program that helps educational organizations replicate its TED Talks and conference model.

Yale on YouTube

Since January 2009, Yale has joined a number of universities and prominent institutions (MoMA, National Geographic, the World Economic Forum) in offering open courseware (at the introductory level), coverage of campus events, and virtual tours on its YouTube channel. From what I can gather, Yale has one of the more comprehensive university presences online, with 318 course videos uploaded to YouTube and thousands of podcasts available on iTunes. Headed by the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, the release of Yale course material is part of the university's "global education mission," and to date there have been 92,825 channel views.

There's been a flurry of universities joining YouTube in the past several years, and in March 2009 YouTube announced its "edu" channel which allows users to aggregate higher ed content. MIT (which, unsurprisingly, has been on YouTube since October 2005) has the most activity, with 38,333 subscribers and 1050 uploads. USC (up since January 2006) also has its own channel, with 179 uploads, as does the School of Cinematic Arts.

Each university structures its channel somewhat differently: Yale privileges its courseware, for example, with a landing video of a lecture on "Real Estate Finance and its Vulnerability to Crisis", while UC Berkeley automatically plays a video of a recent press conference concerning campus police's role leading up to the arrest of Phillip Garrido.

Related to this, or perhaps more fundamental to this development: The OpenCourseWare Consortium.