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By Shefali Rekhi
The curious go to YouTube.
Now those who want something more cerebral go to its educational spinoff, YouTube EDU, in search of pearls of wisdom from, say, experts in specialities from global economics to cell biology.
Many universities are now agreeable to uploading content, often free, on the Web.
The National University of Singapore (NUS), ranked among top global institutions in the world, took up a video channel on YouTube last year.
The channel showcases some of its popular campus discussions - on subjects ranging from Asia vs Europe and the Rwandan civil war to the turnaround story of the Indian Railways and the rise of political Islam in Indonesia.
America's Ivy League is on the bandwagon too. On one website is a lecture by a Harvard University professor on consumer psychology in a time of recession.
Another hosts a session on entrepreneurship and society by a Stanford University professor while a third has a lesson on introductory biology with applications from a classroom in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
An article in Newsweek noted that the democratisation of higher education started in the 1990s, when universities looked to the Web to market their intellectual resources.
In 1999, Germany's University of Tübingen became the first institution of higher learning to offer free lectures on the Web, and in 2002, MIT launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) site, which offers unlimited access to its course material and lectures.
Other American universities thereafter caught the bug to upload some of their material, which till the last decade was available essentially only to fee-paying students.
The trend spread rapidly, so much so that YouTube launched YouTube EDU, its education channel, last year, made it international last month and found strong support from nearly 45 institutions of higher learning in Europe and Israel.
There are a few other websites offering similar content - among them itunes U, which was started in 2004 and hosts content from more than 170 universities, the non-profit ted.com, and Academic Earth, which carries content from top US universities.
There is also UChannel, which features public policy-related content. Set up by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, it includes content from schools in Britain, Australia and Singapore.
Dr Atreyi Kankanhalli of the Department of Information Systems at NUS told The Sunday Times the phenomenon reflects a growing sense 'of corporate social responsibility, of universities wanting to give back to society, to those not as privileged as students'.
But she agreed that much of the online content, while enlightening, was not of the cutting-edge sort.
'This helps protect profitability interests to some extent, while at the same time, these institutions can reach out to a wider pool of potential students,' she noted.
But uploading content does not always come cheap. According to one report, it costs MIT nearly US$10,000 (S$14,000) to upload all the material from a module and perhaps nearly double if there is video content.
Yet, the trend seems unabated despite budget cuts at educational institutions in many places in the West.
But those making use of the free material do not really get the real learning experience, said Mr Nick Hutton, CEO of Singapore-based Universitas21 Global, an online education endeavour hosted for virtual fee-paying students.
'There is no interactivity. Where is the discussion that you find in a classroom?' he asked.
'Yes, you do get some insights in the process, but it is different when the interaction is there,' he added.
Those signing up for programmes with U21 get to hold real- time discussions, using their keyboards, with students from around the world, Mr Hutton said.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
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