6

A GRASSROOTS INITIATIVE:
WEBCAST.BERKELEY

When UC Berkeley professor Lawrence A. Rowe began webcasting his courses in the 1990s, his intention was not to create a university-wide digital dissemination effort. But what began as a proof-of-concept for an individual professor’s research interests in internet video has since evolved into webcast.berkeley, a campus-based initiative offering audio or video recordings of nearly 550 courses by the spring of 2010.

Berkeley has undertaken the webcast initiative almost entirely without the aid of external funding from foundations or other partners. The initiative has a tight budget and small staff but strong ambitions to achieve scale, resulting in a production process focused on efficiency. webcast.berkeley’s content offerings consist of simple audio and video recordings of Berkeley professors’ classroom lectures, using minimal equipment and automatic capture techniques with limited editing. The project’s initial goal was to use technology to benefit the university’s enrolled students. Today webcast.berkeley’s site is visited by users from all over the world, but it remains a student service first and a public service second.

Origins and Development of webcast.berkeley

The origins of webcast.berkeley can be traced back to 1995, when Rowe began webcasting a single course: his own. A technologist and the head of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC), Rowe had an academic interest in incorporating video into user interfaces and applications, and he began experimenting in that area in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, several projects on the Berkeley campus dealt with the use of technology to capture courses, including a College of Engineering program to broadcast televised class sessions aimed at employees of Silicon Valley companies and a Berkeley Media Services operation that recorded university lectures on VHS tapes. Rowe observed that the taped lectures were “a cumbersome system,” as students interested in using them for study had to physically check them out of the library, and viewing was necessarily limited to one student at a time. So he began to explore the potential of broadcasting lectures via streaming digital video.¹

Internet video was in its infancy in the early 1990s, but many technology researchers were investigating possibilities for the transmission of video across networks. Rowe said that, to his knowledge, the first university to webcast course content was University College London in 1994. He was invited to speak there that year and was intrigued by the feedback he received from viewers around the world who had watched his talk online.² That experience, in addition to encouragement from a Berkeley graduate student, prompted Rowe to begin his own webcasting effort: the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System (BIBS). He started with one of his own graduate seminars and developed a method for webcasting live courses, along with the software and user interface to view them.³ His first seminar was disseminated live via the internet in January 1995. A 2008 Edu-cause Review article claims this was the first time an entire course had been transmitted in this manner, and it generated interest: Rowe recalled that “on one or two occasions, we’d have as much as a hundred” people watching a live course.⁴

Rowe attributed his pursuit of webcasting to his own memories of furiously copying his professors’ words in classes, not really paying attention to their meaning in his rush to keep up. He said the original goal was simply “making lecture material available on demand for study after the fact,” as well as experimenting with creating the technology required to do so. Thus, webcast.berkeley was not initially conceived as a large-scale campus activity, but rather as an experimental component of a single professor’s research agenda. But following the webcast of the first course, students close to the project encouraged him to think about including more classes, so he began to add courses in a piecemeal fashion. Rowe said that his response to early student interest in scaling up the project was “ ‘OK, let’s try it.’ To be very honest, I viewed it as a test of the tools and I fully expected it to fail after four or five weeks. I never expected it to work.”⁵ Over the next several years, the number of courses webcast steadily increased—from seven in the fall of 1998 to ten in the spring of 1999 to fifteen in the spring of 2001—and in that time Rowe and his team experimented with several technological solutions and delivery platforms for the webcasts.⁶

Rowe posted his webcasts on the internet for all to see, but as the initiative’s current steward Mara Hancock pointed out, “we didn’t start this to be openly available.” She said that the webcast project “stumbled into ‘open’ by accident—[Rowe] just never bothered to put it behind authentication.”⁷ In Rowe’s recollection, there were two reasons for choosing to make the content publicly available: “One, I didn’t have the resources to do a system that required logins and restrictions . . . it would have been horribly complex,” because some 3,000-5,000 students were enrolled in the Berkeley classes webcast in BIBS’s later years. The second reason was that “I had this fundamental belief that this is a public university funded by public money, and creating content and education is our mission, and so it seemed like publishing this worldwide on the internet was the right way to work towards that mission.” Rowe said—and the then-provost confirmed—that he did not seek the Berkeley administration’s permission to post the courses online for a world audience.⁸ As the webcasting experiment evolved into a more coherent service program, open access to the content was retained.

Under Rowe’s direction, the project operated out of the BMRC. But in the spring of 2001, after Rowe announced his plans to leave the university and the center was slated to close, it became clear that the webcasting program would need a new home if it were to continue. At the administration’s request, the BMRC wrote a paper on BIBS to provide the Berkeley administration with information on the program’s operations and impact on students, intended “to assess the costs and logistics of moving BIBS from BMRC to a permanently funded service organization on campus.”⁹ Following the completion and review of that report, Educational Technology Services (ETS)—the campus service arm also responsible for managing Berkeley’s learning management system, campus radio, and audiovisual needs in classrooms—assumed control over the webcasting effort in the fall of 2001.

In its current form, webcast.berkeley’s goals are twofold: First and foremost, it aims to serve Berkeley’s students.¹⁰ But beyond its chief purpose as a study aid, the webcast program has also provided a window for the world into the Berkeley educational experience. As former Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Gray—who oversaw the transition from BIBS under the BMRC to webcast.berkeley under ETS—has put it, “the internal student service was the thing that got us started, but it . . . snowballed.” As time passed, it “began to dawn on us that it was a public service that we could do at very low incremental cost because of the web. So initially it was for student internal use, but over time we began to think of it as a public service at least as much as a student benefit.”¹¹

webcast.berkeley’s Content and Organization

webcast.berkeley provides multimedia content in the form of recorded video lectures, audio-only versions of lectures, and screen-casting, which combines professors’ PowerPoint slides or other projected material with audio voiceover.¹² The site focuses on capturing lectures in audio-video formats and excludes written materials like syllabi, reading lists, or lecture notes. As Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Christina Maslach said, webcasting lectures is a means of disseminating “the spoken word, but what we have not gone on to do is the MIT thing of doing all the course materials.”¹³

The desire to publish the faculty’s “spoken word” content within the confines of a limited budget has prompted webcast.berkeley to explore automating as many steps of the production process as possible. Rowe said that dating back to the earliest days of developing the BIBS project, “we thought a lot about what can we automate: what’s the minimal set of hardware we can put into a classroom to capture the lecture?” with an eye toward scaling up the effort in the future.¹⁴ Courses are now recorded via cameras and microphones that have been permanently installed in a limited number of Berkeley classrooms, and software has been written to automatically initiate recording at the appropriate time, convert the lectures to viewable formats, and even post the content to the program’s secondary distribution channels like YouTube and iTunes.

The desire to, whenever possible, capture lecture content through these pre-installed devices—rather than sending live camera crews out to various locations, as Open Yale Courses (OYC) and increasingly MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) have done for their video content—allows Berkeley to stretch its budget to cover the maximum number of courses.¹⁵ As a result, the project’s scope is substantial: though it is not comprehensive like OCW, webcast project manager Benjamin Hubbard said that as of the summer of 2009, 442 courses had been captured since 2001, with an average of about 55 courses per semester.¹⁶ Hancock confirmed that the number of courses webcast each semester has risen steadily.¹⁷

With the exception of MIT OCW, no program profiled in this book covers its parent university’s entire undergraduate curriculum, and therefore choices must be made concerning which professors and courses to include in its online courseware initiative. Each institution has approached this selection process differently in accordance with its local goals and strategic priorities. As we have seen, the Carnegie Mellon faculty selected by the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) must have the time and inclination to serve on a course development team, as well as teach disciplines that are a good fit for the OLI’s mode of asynchronous digital pedagogy. At Yale, faculty asked to participate in OYC are renowned tenured professors who teach subjects of general interest to a wide public. Berkeley’s “selection process” is quite different, and largely out of the webcast team’s control: due to the reliance on automated technologies, only those professors who have been assigned by the registrar to teach in web- or podcast-enabled rooms are invited to participate in the initiative.

Hancock said that the site’s content has basically been “un-curated,” and Hubbard agreed that “it was never really our goal to just capture specific faculty, specific courses, [or] specific disciplines”; rather, the webcast team captures as many courses as there are willing faculty members teaching in enabled classrooms.¹⁸ An automated invitation is sent to the faculty members who have been scheduled to teach in those classrooms at the beginning of each semester, at which point they can opt into webcasting. Beginning in the fall of 2009, there were 40 classrooms enabled for video or audio capture on the Berkeley campus, but until then the webcast team had been working with about half that.¹⁹ Of all the faculty members who are asked to participate, roughly 20 percent agree to be webcast.

webcast.berkeley’s body of courses covers a range of disciplines but skews heavily toward the hard sciences, perhaps because the large lecture halls that tend to house those courses (as seen in Figure 6.1) are also frequently webcast enabled.²⁰ Hancock said the site focuses on “sciences, computer sciences, [and] engineering,” and data compiled by Hubbard confirm that from the fall of 2001 to the fall of 2008, 129 courses were offered in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, compared to 285 in the physical sciences.²¹ Faculty do not receive payment or special incentives to participate in webcast.berkeley, but the barriers to doing so are kept to a minimum. Hancock remarked that in working with faculty, “we try not to interrupt their flow at all,” and the amount of extra time that webcasting requires of a faculty member is truly minimal. “One of the great things about it is that it doesn’t get in the way of the teaching,” Hancock said. “We’re just capturing them doing what they do best.”²²

FIGURE 6.1 Still from webcast.berkeley lecture video, Chemistry 1A, session 2, with Professor Heino Nitsche (as taught in fall 2010).

Available at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2010-B-11206&semesterid=2010-B. Permission provided courtesy of University of California Berkeley. © 2002–2010 Regents of the University of California. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND.

With a full-time staff of only three and a relatively low budget—in 2008 the budget for webcast.berkeley’s courses was approximately $700,000—the program must focus on efficiency if it is to, in Hubbard’s words, “do a lot with a little.”²³ Funding for webcast.berkeley has been provided entirely by the university, without outside foundation money. The initiative is supported by a unique business model that divides the cost burden of roughly $5,000 for creating a video course between the ETS budget, which comes from the provost-controlled central campus fund, and the budget of the relevant academic department, which must contribute $2,000 toward the development of the course.²⁴ Berkeley’s Director of Strategic Communications Dan Mogulof said that this reliance on partial cost recovery may also contribute to webcast .berkeley’s emphasis on the sciences, as this business model “inherently favors the departments that [are] well endowed, which tend to be the hard sciences.”²⁵ But early data indicate that the options to create podcasts of audio-only courses, introduced in 2006, and screencasts, started in 2009, may work to restore some disciplinary balance.²⁶ While video courses have cost up to $5,000 to produce (excluding the original investments in recording infrastructure), Hubbard said that ETS can create an audio recording for around $800, eliminating the need to charge the departments to underwrite the overall cost.²⁷ The more cost-effective audio-only model (and now the recently added screencasting option as well) has brought about an “uptick” in the number of arts and humanities courses included in webcast.berkeley in recent years.²⁸

Each element of Berkeley’s production process contributes to the initiative’s goal of “video at scale”—webcast.berkeley’s main value proposition and a key feature distinguishing it from other efforts in this space. Whereas programs like OYC have placed a premium on high production values and maintaining rigorous standards of excellence in the look and feel of course videos and podcasts, webcast.berkeley has tended to prioritize the quantity of courses it is able to publish over their appearance. Hancock has acknowledged this trade-off, saying that “our program came out of [the desire to] have a really high impact on a lot of people, and that means that sometimes you’re not really top quality, but opt for good-enough quality.”²⁹

The webcast.berkeley and OYC staffs are in frequent communication and acknowledge one another as leaders in the field of open online video lectures, while also recognizing the differences in their approaches and resource bases. As Hancock said, “the Yale stuff is incredibly beautiful, but it’s just higher end and we can’t afford to do that.” Berkeley does, however, create more video courses in a semester than OYC has produced over eight semesters to date. Hancock cited some complaints Berkeley has received regarding the quality of the webcast lectures, such as difficulty in following the professor’s point if the camera is on him or her when it should be on the blackboard, but she responded that webcast.berkeley is more focused on “the breadth of what we’re trying to capture.”³⁰ Hubbard also related the issue of webcast.berkeley’s production values to the project’s ability to serve its most important audience—Berkeley students. “We were very conscious of the benefit of this content to the world and the visibility that that provided the university,” he said, but that did not strongly influence the production process. “Production value was not one of the primary drivers for the project; it was really about [creating] a study tool for the students.”³¹

Several other aspects of the project’s design make it clear that, as webcast.berkeley staff member Richard Bloom said, “[our] students are driving our course casting initiative.”³² Focus groups conducted by the webcast team have indicated high demand for the service, and a 2007 study of incoming Berkeley freshmen “revealed that students ranked podcasting to be just as important as wireless Internet and access to email.”³³ To ensure that the site can be an effective study tool, lectures are made available on webcast .berkeley within 24 hours after they are delivered in the classroom. Hubbard emphasized that it is essential to upload the content lecture by lecture as the semester progresses—rather than waiting to publish the complete course, as MIT OCW and OYC do—because “it wouldn’t be valuable to our students to have this content available for review after their midterms.”³⁴

webcast.berkeley is also willing to frequently rerecord the same courses. MIT OCW does occasionally create new versions of courses to ensure that its content remains timely and accurate, but such updates occur on a three-year cycle. In contrast, the webcast.berkeley course Biology 1A has been recorded and webcast 11 times in as many semesters. According to Hubbard, “the current student experience is important,” as a subject covered in this year’s lectures may not have been included in last year’s. An initiative primarily geared toward providing a window into the university for external audiences might consider this an unnecessary duplication of effort, but webcast.berkeley clearly caters to enrolled students who use the recordings in the course of their studies. Hubbard also explained that due to the occasional professor’s preference that his or her class not be publicly broadcast, there is a group of “very few” webcast .berkeley courses—about three per semester—that are behind authentication and cannot be accessed by non-enrolled learners without Berkeley student logins and passwords. Hubbard acknowledges that such courses cannot serve the mission of opening up Berkeley to the world, but he said that the webcast team’s willingness to record such courses anyway is “another demonstration of how student-centered we are—we’re here to serve them, and if faculty and students determine there’s value in webcasting but for whatever reason it can’t be made public, we still want to do that.”³⁵

Though many aspects of the project’s design are focused on students, the inclusion of recordings of campus special events alongside course content in webcast.berkeley seems designed to appeal to an external viewership.³⁶ Nearly all of the universities profiled here record events like performances, speeches, and panels that take place on campus, and often these recordings are freely available, in whole or in part, somewhere on the university’s website. But the webcast program is unique in its decision to combine the course content and events on a single platform (Figure 6.2).

The BIBS program had included a few special events, but that portion of the project was not formalized until 2002 at the behest of a former associate vice chancellor for public affairs, resulting in the launch of a linked but distinct webcast.berkeley/events site. The cost of capturing and disseminating events is not subsidized by the ETS budget; the sponsoring organization in charge of the specific event covers the cost of webcasting it. Hancock said that while the webcast team does not hand-pick professors or courses for webcasting, “we do target events when we know something big is going to be happening,” specifically referencing the team’s recent pursuit of the Dalai Lama when he visited Berkeley.³⁷ Provost George Breslauer explained the decision to combine courses and events based on the similarities of the two content types, saying that “both perform the function of bringing to a humungous audience things that are happening at Berkeley, whether it’s in the classroom or extracurricular.”³⁸

webcast.berkeley has also catered to external audiences through its use of secondary distribution channels for all content, including events and courses. Berkeley was among the first universities to launch channels on iTunes U, in April 2006, as well as the first university to offer full video courses to the public on YouTube.³⁹ Hancock said that the webcast team was interested in these venues’ potential to expand access to the material: “While we were doing a great thing in providing this content, people had to find us. We thought with these distribution channels, we would go where the people were.”⁴⁰

FIGURE 6.2 webcast.berkeley’s landing page (as it appeared on April 29, 2010).

Available at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/. © 2002–2010 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

Impact of webcast.berkeley

webcast.berkeley did not begin as a strategically planned effort at the institutional level. Nevertheless, the initiative has since taken on strategic significance, as it occurred to administrators early on that webcasting could be a relatively low-cost means of furthering some of Berkeley’s institutional objectives, and factors like garnering goodwill or press attention became additional motivators for continuing and expanding the project.

webcast.berkeley has had a variety of internal impacts, both intended and unanticipated. The webcast team has learned that the site’s core audience—enrolled Berkeley students—considers the recorded courses a useful tool for study and review. The BIBS report submitted in 2001 included data from surveys and focus groups of Berkeley students enrolled in the webcasted courses. A majority of those surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that webcasts allowed them to learn at their own pace and “enabled them to better juggle coursework with other work and/or home responsibilities” by allowing them to time-shift their schedules.⁴¹ Berkeley researchers also learned that nonnative English speakers particularly appreciated the service, as it allowed them to slow down and repeat the lecture at their convenience.⁴² The 2001 report also stated that 90 percent of students surveyed “felt that webcasts improved their learning experience.”⁴³

Maslach, Hancock, and Hubbard confirmed that students still use webcast content for those purposes, and that student reactions in more recent focus groups have been similarly positive. Provost Breslauer pointed out that one motivation for recording and disseminating courses may be simply to keep pace with student expectations for technological support. He noted that features like webcasting are becoming an expected facet of the student experience: “That’s what they grew up with, that’s what they’re comfortable with.” In his view, the internal impact of webcast.berkeley is simple: “It makes our students happier; that’s a strategic goal. It augments the channels through which they can learn.”⁴⁴

Berkeley professors have also reported that participating in the webcast program has enhanced their lecturing ability and improved the dynamic of the lectures, as students need not copy furiously when they know they can review lectures at their own pace. As Hubbard put it, “For students, it changes the way they engage in class—and faculty have told us that now they see faces, not the tops of people’s heads” during lectures.⁴⁵ Professor Marian Diamond, who teaches a popular introductory anatomy course, said that she watches her own webcasts to “improve future lectures—because no one else will give you that feedback; you just keep making the same mistakes.”⁴⁶ Some concern has been expressed among faculty that lecture attendance might decline significantly, but Professor Diamond estimated that about 75–80 percent of her students are still showing up to lectures—a number that is not far off the pre-webcast attendance figures.⁴⁷

Such impacts on the key teaching and learning components of the university experience are crucial for an internally supported project. Hancock said that students remain at the core of webcast .berkeley’s self-conception, partially due to the historical fact that serving local students was the basis of Rowe’s initial vision, and also “because of funding issues. . . . It’s unlikely that we’d be doing what we do if the students weren’t impacted by it in a really positive way—and also driving it. Students really want it, so we need their support in order to keep it going.”⁴⁸

Perhaps the most significant unforeseen internal impact of the webcast program has been the press attention it has garnered for the university. According to Rowe, webcasting has “create[d] amazingly positive worldwide publicity for the University of California at Berkeley.”⁴⁹ Gray agreed, emphasizing that the visibility the webcast program has afforded the university has “really helped our self-image.” He said that despite UC Berkeley’s already sterling reputation and strong name recognition, fresh positive press attention can still be meaningful. “We get the press we get largely because we have famous scientists that are big-time research people. But the people of California value the teaching side over the research side,” Gray said, “so [webcast.berkeley] is a chance to get some public recognition for the educational role and teaching.”⁵⁰

It is instructive to consider the webcast.berkeley project within the context of the primary mandate for California’s public colleges and universities: to expand access to higher education within the state. The California Master Plan for Higher Education, proposed in 1960, guarantees admissions consideration for the top one-eighth of high school graduates to the UC system and the top one-third to the California State University (CSU) system; the rest are to be admitted to the state’s community colleges.⁵¹ Each tier of the system has its own mission and its own student populations from which to draw; the plan is intended both to maintain excellence—with few exceptions, the UC system is legally limited to drawing from the top 12.5 percent of applicants—and to ensure widespread access to higher education for California residents through the CSU and community college tracks.⁵² The plan has undergone revision each subsequent decade and has since mandated that all applicants in the top one-eighth be offered a place somewhere in the UC system.⁵³

The master plan, an unfunded mandate to guarantee access to all the state’s high school graduates, was put in place in an era when the system was well financed and the state’s population considerably smaller.⁵⁴ In 2004 the UC system was forced to turn down qualified applicants for the first time since the plan’s adoption, as the state’s rising population coupled with the system’s budget cutbacks caused demand to outstrip supply.⁵⁵ The situation had righted itself by 2006, but it recurred in 2008.⁵⁶ Thus the webcast .berkeley project has developed against a backdrop of anxiety about the system’s ability to educate the students who are eligible for it, as well as to provide value to the vast majority of California residents who are not.

The exposure that webcast.berkeley has afforded the university allows the institution to demonstrate its return on the public’s investment. Discussing why Berkeley continued to support—indeed, to expand—webcasting under ETS after the BMRC closed, Gray said that “it just seemed obvious that at a public university like this, if you can dramatically increase access to the knowledge base with almost no incremental cost, it would help us, because we could buy taxpayer support, we could buy public support, we could do good for the state. There were a lot of good reasons to recommend it.”⁵⁷ Given the current economic situation, that need to demonstrate value is more pressing than ever. Mogulof said that through webcast.berkeley, the university is “perceived to be and actually [is] sharing with the public, whose financial support is vital to our survival, and creating a sense of shared ownership and shared benefit” of public higher education.⁵⁸

Provost Breslauer agreed, saying that “you could think of [webcast.berkeley] as a builder of goodwill toward UC Berkeley, which is a nontrivial consideration. Given the crisis in public higher education in state funding, we need all the goodwill we can get. So that you might say it performs a political function.” He added that the initiative has not yet directly been used to appeal to legislators for funding, “but showing a legislator a 15-minute clip of a course by Richard Muller on ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ could be a good political strategy. I don’t know that we’ve even begun to tap the potential . . . of webcast for purposes of political lobbying.”⁵⁹

Closer to home, webcasting has also become one element of Berkeley’s campus disaster preparedness planning, as some feel it would offer a way to resume teaching quickly following an earthquake or other incident. Maslach pointed out that webcast .berkeley was not originally developed for this purpose, but it has been discussed as an aspect of Berkeley’s approach to “being a disaster-resistant institution.”⁶⁰ She spoke of the need for an archive of courses on hand should classes have to be suspended—logic that seems to be gaining traction at other schools as well. A September 2009 item in Inside Higher Ed reported that multiple public university systems are looking into strengthening online learning options as a way to continue instruction for students who may be quarantined due to outbreaks like pandemic flu.⁶¹ Hancock added that the cache of webcasted courses is considered valuable for its potential “to help with what we call instructional continuity: getting back to teaching as soon as possible.”⁶²

All involved confirm that enrolled Berkeley students were the project’s original audience and remain foremost in the minds of the webcast team. In Hancock’s words: “MIT OpenCourseWare had this grand vision and an influx of capital to make it happen,” but Berkeley’s initiative was different. “We weren’t focused on being OpenCourseWare, we were focused on providing a basic community service and a service to our students. So I think we really started from different places.”⁶³ But it quickly became apparent that the material had a global viewership, and the importance of that secondary audience has increased over time.

The webcast team has never had a concrete target for the project’s level of usage, but all involved are satisfied and even pleasantly surprised with the traffic the materials have received. Viewership started off small and mostly confined to the Berkeley community. In a 1999 story on the BIBS program, Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian, reported that “at one point Wednesday afternoon, there were 70 people throughout the world watching one of three UC Berkeley classes broadcast over the Internet. Rowe said he was stunned by the program’s popularity.”⁶⁴ The BIBS project saw incremental increases in usage; in the spring of 2000 the lectures had 10,892 plays per month, and in the spring of 2002 they had 44,184 plays per month.⁶⁵

But in recent years the addition of Berkeley’s iTunes and YouTube channels has caused usage to increase dramatically, and webcast.berkeley’s non-enrolled viewing population now greatly outnumbers the number of enrolled students using the materials. ETS project manager Adam Hochman said in 2007 that “since we launched [podcasting] in 2006, overall we saw 2 million downloads of our podcasts in the first year alone from our iTunes U channel. We have had 650,000 views in the first two weeks of our YouTube channel launch. Interest in our content has exploded.”⁶⁶ More recent statistics compiled by Hubbard corroborate this trend: as of the spring of 2010, webcast.berkeley content on iTunes has been downloaded over 13 million times (since the service was introduced in April 2006), content on YouTube has been downloaded over 9 million times (since the service was introduced in October 2007), and the webcast.berkeley site has received over 80 million streams and downloads since it launched in 2001.⁶⁷

Other than gathering simple web analytics, webcast.berkeley has not conducted any overall usage studies, so the external impact of the current effort has not yet been systematically quantified or analyzed.⁶⁸ But all involved are confident that the project is having an impact, based on the anecdotal feedback that Berkeley receives from viewers around the world. Hancock admitted that “we continue to be challenged because of the openness aspect” when it comes to “really knowing how this content is being used.”⁶⁹ Hubbard confirmed that the webcast team has not undertaken public usage or impact studies: “We’ve had a lot of anecdotal conversations with people and received love letters from users,” but not much more than that. “We’d like to do more of that sort of thing, but we’re doing what we can when we can, and that’s producing the content and making it available.”⁷⁰

Hancock said, “I don’t know if it’s had a huge external impact on the world, but it has certainly had an impact on individuals, and that is how you change the world. I really believe that.”⁷¹ Professor Marian Diamond, whose webcasted course on anatomy is one of the initiative’s most popular, feels that the project has had great significance for her and her global classroom: “I just love being on . . . YouTube because I get letters from [people] all over the world saying they love the anatomy class, and I correspond with every one.” Diamond recalled that going in, she didn’t think about the world audience, so that kind of attention was a pleasant surprise. But it is that external audience’s reaction that has really captivated her: “It’s just opened a world for people, and that’s why I’m enthusiastic. You don’t get that with your students here, who have paid to be there and are thinking about what they’re going to eat for dinner” during lectures.⁷²

webcast.berkeley and Sustainability

As with other aspects of the program, webcast.berkeley’s budget and funding were not meticulously planned from the start but have evolved naturally over time. Gray said that the business or resource allocation model was not formally developed at the outset: “I don’t think there ever was a process. It was subterranean; it was an incremental, ‘well, why not?’ sort of thing”—he would increase the budget if the BMRC asked.⁷³ Hancock also does not know how the project’s budget was originally determined. “There was not solid data around this, and in fact this program has continued to grow without really solid data around capacity planning”; though she also noted that due to the initiative’s focus on automation, as the number of courses webcast has scaled up, the project’s staffing costs have remained stable. Hancock is also unsure of the program’s total costs to date, saying that “some of the decisions weren’t even made strategically in the early days”—choices as to which vendors to work with and agreements reached could very much have been related to the personalities involved.⁷⁴ But despite the lack of complete transparency as to costs, those involved share a sense that the project is quite inexpensive. Rowe said that the original BIBS program “didn’t cost us much to produce it; we were really efficient in what we were doing. We did it for $50,000 per semester for 15 courses,” or $3,000–$4,000 per course.⁷⁵ Gray also perceived the budget as quite low during his tenure as provost: in both its BIBS and webcast.berkeley incarnations, the project “was a pretty cheap thing.”⁷⁶

Currently, webcast.berkeley does not have a discrete budget of its own; it draws its funding from the overall ETS budget.⁷⁷ According to Hancock, the initiative’s annual budget allocation fluctuates, as different numbers of courses and events are captured each semester, but she estimated that the course component of webcast .berkeley cost about $700,000 for the 2008–9 school year.⁷⁸ The webcast team makes a substantial upfront investment in hardware for particular classrooms: each outfitted room contains recording hardware—a Mac Mini computer—as well as additional equipment to enable either podcasting or screencasting, at a total cost of $2,300-$2,800.⁷⁹ The ongoing costs of creating video amount to about $5,000 per course, while audio podcasts and screencast courses cost about $800 to produce.⁸⁰

Because the webcast project was launched as an experiment, not much attention was paid to long-term sustainability in the initiative’s early phases. Rowe recalled that when he started the project, “it was purely a question of can we do this, and if so, how do we make it work?”⁸¹ Gray agreed, but ventured that “it would have been good to have those discussions. I think we figured that it was sustainable when it started in the early 2000s because it wasn’t that expensive and we had plenty of money. We didn’t sit around and say . . . ‘what are we going to do when tough times hit?’”⁸²

Webcasting was not originally conceived as an institution-wide program, and consequently it developed with a low degree of administrative involvement. The senior university leadership was not consulted about the particulars of the BIBS project. Gray remarked that decisions to develop new initiatives “typically get made in a chancellor’s cabinet meeting, but I don’t remember anything like that [related to webcast.berkeley]. I think it just sort of grew.”⁸³ The Carnegie Mellon provost had concerns about the funding mechanism for the OLI at the outset, but he was present for the initial meetings with the Hewlett Foundation, whereas the Berkeley administration was not directly engaged in developing webcast .berkeley. Provost Breslauer confirmed that this is still the case today: discussing the administration’s role in the project, he explained that “annually they ask for money and annually I give it, and we get occasional updates on how it’s going through the vice provost for teaching and learning. But there’s not a great deal of interaction, because I know it’s in good hands.”⁸⁴

The vast majority of the decisions regarding webcast.berkeley are made at ETS’s level, and Hancock said that at such a large institution, keeping the project visible to the university president and provost can be “quite challenging.”⁸⁵ She feels confident that webcast.berkeley is a good fit with the chancellor’s overall vision of Access and Excellence for the university,⁸⁶ but she said that her team has had to demonstrate that connection: “He hasn’t picked it up himself. It’s not like MIT, where you had the president going whole hog with this vision.” Rather, it has been ETS’s responsibility to articulate the importance of the webcast project.⁸⁷ Hubbard agreed, noting that the Berkeley leadership does not take a “proactive” approach to promoting webcast.berkeley on campus.⁸⁸

Gray pointed out that when webcast.berkeley began in earnest under ETS in 2001, the university was in a solid financial position: “2000, 2001, and the start of 2002 were really good times; there was lots of money,” and in webcast.berkeley’s case, “it wasn’t [asking for] much money, so it was easy.” In years past, the financial threshold for university support and participation was fairly low, but Gray added that he is not sure what the university will do about webcasting in the near future: “times are really a lot tougher now than they were then.”⁸⁹

In July 2009, the president of the UC system issued a “Declaration of Extreme Financial Emergency, effective September 1, 2009 to August 31, 2010” and approved a salary reduction plan to furlough all university employees paid by the state, among other measures.⁹⁰ Across the UC system, incoming first-year classes have been reduced by 6 percent while tuition has been raised by 9 percent, in addition to reducing individual campus budgets by over $300 million.⁹¹ Decreased budgets have resulted in extreme cutbacks on hiring—”at Berkeley . . . faculty searches are expected to fall from about 100 a year to 10 in 2009–10”—and there is a serious risk of losing current faculty to wealthier institutions.⁹² The upshot of all this is that UC schools have been forced to accept a 20 percent across-the-board budget cut. In a speech on August 20, 2009, University of California President Mark Yudof predicted further cutbacks, stating that “when the stimulus package disappears next year, that’s when our budget will go back into the hole again,”⁹³ indicating that there are no signs of recovery in the near future. In the current economic climate, nearly all university activities are facing unprecedented pressure to prove their return on investment. As Hancock sees it, the question regarding webcast.berkeley now becomes “Is this just a nice-to-have? Or is it a strategic imperative?”⁹⁴

The new economic realities pose a series of challenges to webcast .berkeley’s current business model. The video portion of the program has been funded to date by cost-sharing with the departments, but Gray has concerns about the continuing viability of this system: “We’re in really bad shape right now budget-wise, and the departments are the ones that are really getting killed. So I would guess that model is under severe stress. . . . A lot of these departments are laying people off right now, and this is a nice add-on, but if it’s a choice between doing [webcast.berkeley] and laying someone off, you’re not going to do it.”⁹⁵ In Mogulof’s view, “I think [webcast. berkeley], like a lot of other programs, could be on the bubble. This is something really unprecedented; the leadership of this institution have never seen anything like this in their academic careers. They’re facing some tough choices, and it remains to be seen” whether the program will retain its funding. Mogulof said that losing the initiative would deprive students of a resource they have become accustomed to, and “it would put a chink in our ability to communicate what we want to communicate to the public about what’s great and good about this place. . . . [But] can the university maintain their standard of excellence without webcast? The answer is probably yes.”⁹⁶

This difficult budgetary scenario may pose challenges for webcast .berkeley’s planned expansion, which according to Hubbard includes increasing the number of equipped classrooms from the current 40 to 70 by 2011. Budgetary considerations may also prompt Berkeley to evaluate monetization options for the project that might not have otherwise been contemplated. To date, offering credits for webcast.berkeley courses has not been seriously considered, though in this economy many interviewees envision that possibility in the future. Hancock said that at the moment, “we are not talking about credit. People are hostile to the idea that we would simply take a webcast and provide credit; you have to build opportunities for student engagement, assessments, and the additional material around it.”⁹⁷ Gray recounted that at Berkeley, “we’ve been talking about a remote-access for-credit program for a long time, and the faculty have resisted it every time . . . the reason is quality: when we turn out a masters student or a PhD, it’s someone who’s been here on the campus, in this building, rubbing shoulders with professors here . . . so a Berkeley degree has that threshold to it, and the faculty here has never wanted to produce a student that didn’t have that.”⁹⁸

But signs are beginning to emerge of a willingness, born out of financial necessity, to fundamentally rethink the way things are done in the UC system. In the summer of 2009, the chairman of the UC Board of Regents, along with UC President Yudof, committed to establishing “a commission to examine fundamental questions about the university’s future,” including foundational issues related to its institutional structure, methods of teaching, and business model.⁹⁹ To that end, several bold proposals have been made to move into the online space. The dean of the Berkeley campus’s law school, Christopher Edley, wrote in a 2009 Los Angeles Times opinion piece that the UC system should develop an eleventh campus, on par with the current ten but entirely online.¹⁰⁰ It is conceivable that the webcasting begun at Berkeley could provide an interesting bridge to such a program, though Edley told the Chronicle that for a UC “cybercampus” to be successful, it would be imperative to “use the best teachers and very high production values in the video offerings, not just setting up a camera in the back of the room while somebody delivers their lecture.”¹⁰¹ More recently, the University of California has approved a pilot project to create and evaluate fully online courses, which could be offered for credit either to enrolled UC students or, eventually, as part of full online undergraduate degrees.¹⁰²

Other aspects of online education intrigue Provost Breslauer—namely, the revenue possibilities that charging for an expanded program of online courses might offer. “There’s a huge, huge untapped market out there.” He said that particularly in the university extension area, Berkeley is interested in developing webcast technology “for extracurricular revenue enhancement.” But while the Berkeley administration certainly “see[s] potential for leveraging their webcasting ability,” he is not sure if the webcast.berkeley program per se will be involved in a potentially monetized online course program.¹⁰³

It has always been imperative that the UC system provide value to California taxpayers. But the financial insolvency that has gripped the state government (and with it the university) since 2008 has jeopardized all non-essential projects, necessitating a renewed demonstration of the value that higher education brings to the state. Depending on how a small media program like webcast .berkeley is viewed by university leadership in the coming years, it may be considered either a prime target for budget cuts or an essential tool for outreach and community relations.

The way forward is unclear, as there are competing notions of how webcast.berkeley can best make a case for itself in changing times. Daniel Greenstein, the University of California’s vice provost for academic planning, programs and coordination, has argued that projects deemed truly essential to the university’s core teaching and learning mission may have the best chance of survival: “Where we can demonstrate that the things that we’re doing aren’t just sort of public goods, but they actually help [the university] as well . . . they’ll have a better chance” of retaining their funding.¹⁰⁴ This potential turn inward stems from a key characteristic of the webcast program—the student-centric nature of its initial design—that has set it apart from others in this space.

But there is also an argument to be made for focusing on the project’s outreach component by emphasizing its impact beyond Berkeley. Discussing the university’s financial state in the summer of 2009, Hancock said, “It’s dire right now. And one of the issues that comes up [among California residents] is ‘what is this big, hefty, expensive institution doing for us?’ And if we all live in our ivory tower, nobody can really understand what we do and where the value is, and this is a way of exposing that work.”¹⁰⁵ Provost Breslauer echoed this sentiment, suggesting that Berkeley’s investments in acts of intellectual philanthropy may eventually pay dividends. “It’s sort of an act of faith that the more things you’re willing to give away for free, the more goodwill you’ll generate,” he said. “We need all the friends in the state of California we can possibly get.”¹⁰⁶

 

¹ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09.

² Ibid.

³ Rowe, Lawrence A., Diane Harley, Peter Pletcher, and Shannon Lawrence, “BIBS: A Lecture Webcasting System—Executive Summary,” BIBS Report Executive Summary, June 2001, http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/research/publications/2001/160/bibs-exec.html.

⁴ Edmonds, Victor, “Video Vision,” Educause Review, online edition, 43, no. 5 (September–October 2008); interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09.

⁵ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09. Rowe added that originally, “we didn’t intend to do anything with classes per se; we were just trying to experiment and see what we could do.”

⁶ Timeline prepared by Lawrence Rowe, July 2009.

⁷ Interview with Mara Hancock, 8/19/08.

⁸ Interviews with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09, and Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁹ Rowe, Lawrence A., Diane Harley, Peter Pletcher, and Shannon Lawrence, BIBS: A Lecture Webcasting System, Paper CSHE4’01, June 2001, http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/research/publications/2001/160/bibs-report.pdf, 2.

¹⁰ According to ETS director Mara Hancock, “there are very few places where things are just done for students,” but webcast.berkeley is an example of a tool to help students achieve success in their coursework (interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09). In the words of former project director Obadiah Greenberg, “this reinforces the digital bridge to our students, alumni, and the world, and allows us to explore new distribution channels” (quoted in Leung, Linda, “UC Berkeley Offers Course Materials on iTunes,” Network World, online edition, April 25, 2006).

¹¹ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

¹² Screencasting, the newest element of the webcast.berkeley service, was introduced in the spring of 2009.

¹³ Interview with Christina Maslach, 8/20/08.

¹⁴ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09.

¹⁵ A technician is needed for video courses, to operate the controls that point the mounted cameras, but this is far simpler and less labor intensive than the recording process at Yale, which requires two live camera operators using portable equipment. webcast.berkeley does occasionally send camera people with Portapak equipment into classrooms, but they rarely use this method. According to Hubbard, occasionally “we do have a sort of hybrid approach; we will send camera people out to classrooms that aren’t equipped. It’s usually about three to five classes a semester, and we really try to limit it because it’s very labor intensive, and what we’re really focused on is providing a lot of value for a limited investment” (interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09).

¹⁶ Personal communication from Benjamin Hubbard, 6/16/09. By the spring of 2010, the number had increased to 548 courses (personal communication with Mara Hancock, 3/19/10).

¹⁷ Although the number of video courses captured began to decline in late 2008, presumably due to departments’ budgetary concerns, the rise in podcast and screencast courses (for which academic departments do not incur an additional fee, as described later in the chapter) has more than made up for the difference, and Hubbard noted that by the spring of 2010, webcast.berkeley was back to 55 courses per semester (personal communication from Benjamin Hubbard, 3/16/10).

¹⁸ Interviews with Mara Hancock, 8/19/08, and Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09.

¹⁹ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

²⁰ Interview with Christina Maslach, 8/20/08.

²¹ Table compiled by Benjamin Hubbard, 6/16/09.

²² Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

²³ Interviews with Mara Hancock and Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09. Hubbard noted that while webcast.berkeley has three dedicated full-time employees, the program does “rely a lot on a really large group,” including other ETS staffers like classroom technicians in charge of video recording or production, and those who install the cameras and maintain the equipment. As is the case with all online courseware projects profiled here, individuals from around the university devote portions of their time to assisting with the webcasting initiative in addition to their other responsibilities.

²⁴ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09. Hancock said that very rare exceptions are made to this cost-sharing model. For example, Berkeley physics professor Rich Muller expressed interest in participating but “his department doesn’t want to pay for it, and he’s a big star, so we said we would cover it. He gets a lot of publicity for the program . . . so we didn’t want to lose that—he’s the kind of advocate you want to have out there and visible. So it’s a small investment for long-term gain.”

²⁵ Interview with Dan Mogulof, 6/18/09. Hancock agreed with this reasoning but offered additional explanations for the science-heavy nature of webcasting, pointing out that “it originated in EECS [electrical engineering and computer science] with Larry [Rowe], and they’re not afraid of technology, so in the early days they weren’t afraid of going that way.” She also said that there tend to be fewer intellectual property concerns with introductory science courses than their counterparts in the humanities (interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09).

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/9/09. The webcast program concentrates much of its costs up front, including the one-time purchase of the recording devices to equip classrooms.

²⁸ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09.

²⁹ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09.

³² Riismandel, Paul, “How to Manage Video Content in Higher Education,” Streaming Media Magazine, online edition, February–March 2008.

³³ “Cisco Prepares Higher Education Market to Seize Two Leading Tech Trends: Web 2.0 and Interoperable Communications,” press release, Market News Publishing, October 24, 2007.

³⁴ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/9/09.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ According to Hubbard, students “are probably not the primary audience for events—the motivations for putting that [event] content up are specific to each individual sponsor” (ibid.).

³⁷ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

³⁸ Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09.

³⁹ Lee, Ellen, “Full Cal Courses Are on YouTube,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 2007, C1.

⁴⁰ Interview with Mara Hancock, 8/19/08. Hubbard noted that these platforms are also familiar to Berkeley students and therefore help ETS reach its core student audience as well (interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09).

⁴¹ Rowe et al., BIBS: A Lecture Webcasting System, 15.

⁴² Harley, Diane, Jonathan Henke, Shannon Lawrence, Flora McMartin, Michael Maher, Marytza Gawlik, and Parisa Muller, Cost, Culture, and Complexity: An Analysis of Technology Enhancements in a Large Lecture Course at UC Berkeley, March 2003, http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/cost_culture_and_complexity.pdf, 25.

⁴³ Rowe et al., BIBS: A Lecture Webcasting System, 15.

⁴⁴ Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09.

⁴⁵ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/9/09.

⁴⁶ Interview with Marian Diamond, 6/9/09.

⁴⁷ Harley et al., Cost, Culture, and Complexity; interview with Marian Diamond, 6/9/09.

⁴⁸ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁴⁹ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09.

⁵⁰ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁵¹ University of California Office of the President, “Major Features of the California Master Plan for Higher Education,” http://www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mpsummary.htm.

⁵² University of California Office of the President, “The California Master Plan for Higher Education in Perspective,” http://www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mpperspective.htm.

⁵³ University of California Office of the President, “Access Provisions of the California Master Plan for Higher Education,” http://www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mpaccess.htm.

⁵⁴ Keller, Josh, “California’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Higher Education Falls upon Hard Times,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, June 11, 2009.

⁵⁵ Trounson, Rebecca, “UC System Accepts Record 55,242 Calif. Applicants for Fall Term,” Los Angeles Times, online edition, April 20, 2006.

⁵⁶ Gordon, Larry, “UC Might Limit Freshmen Enrollment,” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2008.

⁵⁷ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁵⁸ Interview with Dan Mogulof, 6/18/09.

⁵⁹ Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09.

⁶⁰ Interview with Christina Maslach, 8/20/08.

⁶¹ Kolowich, Steve, “Dodging Swine Online,” Inside Higher Ed, September 18, 2009.

⁶² Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Yaffe, Jonathan, “Online Lectures Get Mixed Reviews,” Daily Californian, online edition, October 4, 1999.

⁶⁵ Rowe, Lawrence A., Diane Harley, Peter Pletcher, and Shannon Lawrence, “BIBS: Usage Statistics,” BIBS Report Executive Summary, July 2002, http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/research/publications/2001/160/bibs-stats.html.

⁶⁶ Quoted in “Cisco Prepares Higher Education Market.”

⁶⁷ Personal communication with Benjamin Hubbard, 3/16/10. Rowe cautioned that “the statistics that the folks at Berkeley get [now], I’m a little skeptical about, to be very honest. They do the kind of easy analysis of the logs; I just don’t trust the way they’re getting the data” (interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09). Indeed, Hubbard indicated that the webcast team is currently reassessing their methods of evaluating and reporting usage data.

⁶⁸ Exceptions came during the BIBS phase—for instance, an in-depth two-year analysis (2000–2) funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Cost-Effective Uses of Technology in Teaching program. The study examined the economic and pedagogical consequences of using an online version of Chemistry 1A, a major Berkeley gateway course enrolling approximately 2,000 students per year. The online version in the study utilized webcast lectures created via the BIBS project, as well as other elements not otherwise included in BIBS or webcast.berkeley, like “on-line quizzes and pre-laboratory assignments” and “conversion of the lecture chalkboard content to digital slides.” The study found measurable cost savings in the second year of the project and no signifi cant difference in learning outcomes between the students using the online version and a control group (see Harley et al., “Cost, Culture, and Complexity”). But the study’s principal investigator, Diane Harley, said that these results “were generally ignored by the campus, which was not ready to reengineer large lecture/laboratory courses to reduce costs and/or serve more students” (personal communication with Diane Harley, 1/19/10).

⁶⁹ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁷⁰ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09. Hubbard added that “we’ve made conscious choices about where we’re placing our priorities,” and that “we feel like there’s enough anecdotal evidence or momentum that it would be great, but supplemental, to have that kind of [evaluation] effort. Our core focus needed to be producing the content or improving the system or expanding to new classrooms, so that’s where we focused our energies.” Discussing the effort’s external impact, Breslauer reported hearing encouraging anecdotes related to use of webcast.berkeley, “but those are anecdotes, I don’t really know what to make of it except to feel good about that one story” (interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09).

⁷¹ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁷² Interview with Marian Diamond, 6/9/09.

⁷³ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁷⁴ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁷⁵ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09; Rowe et al., “BIBS: A Lecture Webcasting System—Executive Summary.” Rowe did point out that that figure excludes the hardware costs.

⁷⁶ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁷⁷ Interview with Christina Maslach, 8/20/08.

⁷⁸ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁷⁹ Personal communication with Benjamin Hubbard, 3/27/10.

⁸⁰ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/9/09. The hardware needed for podcasting is substantially less expensive than that required to record video lectures. “Each audio recording room is outfitted with an Instreamer—a device that takes recordings from lecture-hall sound systems and converts them into Web-ready MP3 files” and retails for $395 (Read, Brock, “How to Podcast Campus Lectures,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, January 26, 2007).

⁸¹ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09.

⁸² Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09.

⁸⁵ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁸⁶ Birgeneau, Robert J., “Access and Excellence,” Fall 2008, http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/news/chancellor/access/access.shtml.

⁸⁷ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁸⁸ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/9/09.

⁸⁹ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁹⁰ University of California Office of the President, “Recommendation for Declaration of Financial Emergency and Approval of Budget Reduction Actions,” for meeting of July 15, 2009, of the committees on finance and compensation, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/jul09/j2.pdf, 1.

⁹¹ Young, Samantha, “University Leader Warns of More Steep Budget Cuts,” Mercury News, online edition, 8/20/09.

⁹² Stripling, Jack, “Tarnished Jewel,” Inside Higher Ed, July 13, 2009.

⁹³ Quoted in Young, “University Leader Warns of More Steep Budget Cuts.”

⁹⁴ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁹⁵ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁹⁶ Interview with Dan Mogulof, 6/18/09. In 2009 ETS proposed levying a course materials fee on Berkeley students to cover the costs of the webcast program. Despite positive feedback on the issue from a few early student focus groups, the approving subcommittee (composed of students, faculty, and administrators) ultimately rejected the proposed fee. According to Hancock, “there was a sentiment that we couldn’t charge students for something that we gave away for free” to the broader public (interview with Mara Hancock, 4/16/10).

⁹⁷ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

⁹⁸ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁹⁹ Stripling, “Tarnished Jewel.”

¹⁰⁰ Edley, Christopher J., “Building a New UC—In Cyberspace,” Los Angeles Times, online edition, July 1, 2009.

¹⁰¹ Quoted in Beja, Marc, “Online Campus Could Solve Many U. of California Problems, a Dean Says,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, July 22, 2009. Clearly, Edley envisions something beyond webcast.berkeley’s current capabilities. Along those lines, Hancock reported that, as of the spring of 2010, webcast.berkeley was working with the chemistry department on a project to create higher-quality videos of Chemistry 1A. The professor will deliver the lectures in a recording studio, allowing for improved quality, and ETS has upgraded some of its recording equipment to high definition to accommodate the project. This is a small pilot initiated by the academic department itself (which secured outside grant funding to cover the costs), so it is uncertain whether other webcast.berkeley courses will receive similar upgrades in the near future (interview with Mara Hancock, 4/16/10).

¹⁰² University of California, University Committee on Educational Policy, “Online Undergraduate Instruction at a Selective University: An Intensive, Faculty-Led Evaluation of Opportunities, Challenges, Quality, Cost, and Viability,” draft prospectus, version 12, March 30, 2010, http://ccfit.ucdavis.edu/calendar/2009-10/docs/ucep%20project%20description%20final.pdf.

¹⁰³ Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09. Breslauer said that for future online moneymaking ventures, “I think we ought to be concentrating our attention on UC Berkeley extension degrees, because they are the real big potential moneymakers.” He noted that the extension has been profitable lately, “and we’re now planning on its becoming a cash cow for the campus, while at the same time offering extension degrees and masters degrees to the world.” Such a plan still must be approved by the regents, but Breslauer commented that “There’s a huge upside potential for leveraging the university extension.”

¹⁰⁴ Interview with Daniel Greenstein, 6/8/09.

¹⁰⁵ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09.

¹⁰⁶ Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09.