U.C. Berkeley plans open source software for lecture distribution

U.C. Berkeley plans open source software for lecture distribution - San Francisco Business Times:
Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 11:35am PDT | Modified: Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 11:40am
San Francisco Business Times - by Steven E.F. Brown

The University of California, Berkeley, plans to set up an open source software project for widespread distribution of automatically made video and audio recordings of lectures and other events on campus.

Cal was the first university to put full-length videos of its lectures on YouTube in 2007. Audio podcasts of many of the school's lectures, like Marian Diamond's hugely popular introduction to human anatomy, have been available online for years.

The university has already spent $220,000 this year on this project, named "Opencast Matterhorn." Now grants totaling $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett foundations will cover that expense and pay for further development of the system.

Cal will work with ETH Zürich in Switzerland, the University of Osnabrück in Germany, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and Canada's University of Saskatchewan on the project.

Money from these grants will pay for open source software that automates the recording and posting of academic content, cutting the cost of recording and uploading material. Cal says until now universities have been "stymied by high technical barriers and costs" even when they have wanted to distribute such content.

The software will be aimed at popular services like YouTube (based in San Bruno and owned by giant Google Inc.) and Apple Inc.'s online store, iTunes.

Adam Hochman is U.C. Berkeley's project manager for the program.

An open source system is in keeping with the university's traditions and its sense of its place as a public school, paid for by the public and doing research and teaching in the public interest. Many Cal researchers welcome questions from people who aren't students at the school, and reach out to them as part of their academic mission.

The university counts the open source Unix operating system, with its roots in Cal's 1970s research, as one of its achievements.