On restricting access to lecture webcasts | DailyCal.org

"UC Berkeley’s open-access webcast service may soon be restricted to students. But unless administrators commit to maintaining the amount of effort our campus currently dedicates to public service and education, the service should remain as is. For more than a decade, Educational Technology Services, or ETS, has managed and facilitated the webcast service, which makes recordings of lectures from select UC Berkeley courses open to the public through YouTube and iTunes U. Many lectures have been viewed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of times, evidencing their broad appeal. People from around the world have utilized the webcast service and provided feedback to lecturers. All told, the service has played a significant role in the campus’s efforts to disseminate knowledge. As ETS deputy director Ben Hubbard noted at the March 11 meeting of the ASUC Senate, however, there are costs associated with keeping the webcast service open to anyone. Because the webcasts are publicly accessible, ETS staff are tasked with monitoring lecture captures in real time and removing copyrighted material. Restricting the webcasts to students would reduce labor costs by eliminating the need for such editing and supervision. (Consequently, as an added bonus for students, lectures could go online almost immediately after their completion.) There’s also the prospect that faculty members are deterred from participating in the webcast program because of the public-access model. Perhaps some faculty members would consider offering webcasts exclusively for their students’ use but don’t feel comfortable with the idea of inviting the world into their classrooms. Meanwhile, as Hubbard argued at the meeting, the proliferation of massive open online courses, or MOOCs — which offer nonstudents a more complete learning experience than decontextualized lecture webcasts — has diminished the benefits of keeping webcasts openly accessible. On balance, ETS would be justified in converting its lecture webcast service to a students-only model as a means of reining in the program’s budget. But it cannot be ignored that such an undertaking, in isolation, would compromise UC Berkeley’s public service mission while protecting teaching and research. At this critical time for the university — as the UC system lobbies for additional funding from the state — we should be careful to avoid the perception that we’re asking for more from taxpayers while giving back less. To this end, the current balance between the campus’s internal missions — teaching and research — and external mission — public service — should be maintained. Assuming that the webcast service becomes restricted to students, there are two reasonable courses of action. One would be to reduce expenditures on teaching and research — regardless of the campus unit or department — and advertise a connection between those reductions and the ETS cuts. Maybe this would involve finding more efficiencies in the university’s teaching and research operations or, in a worst-case scenario, maybe a useful program would need to be scaled back. The more preferable course of action would be to reallocate existing resources or raise money for the purpose of preserving the level at which the campus’s external mission is funded. If it is the case that MOOCs are more useful to the public than lecture webcasts, then we should be accelerating the development of MOOCs ..."