In her recent remarks to the University of California Board of Regents, the new UC President Janet Napolitano stated the University’s mission: “UC teaches for California, but it researches for the world.”
But by making a small change to BruinCast, an educational system already in place, UCLA can flip that statement on its head and begin to teach for the world.
BruinCast is a service of the UCLA Office of Instructional Development that provides audio and video recordings of lectures. Making those recordings more widely available does the public an educational service at little additional cost and effort to the university.
Currently, the system’s framework allows professors who sign up for the service to choose whether the recordings of their lectures will be restricted to students enrolled in their class or made open to the public.
UCLA should make it the default option for all lectures to be public and have professors opt out of public broadcasting if they wish to keep their lectures private.
Currently there is no default setting – public or private – for BruinCast, so requiring professors to opt out of the public setting will likely result in an increased number of open and unrestricted lectures.
The phenomenon is a well-documented one. Systems that are “opt out,” where participation is the norm, see better participation rates than systems that are “opt in.”
A prominent example in social science circles is the organ donation rate in European countries: nations where being an organ donor is the default see much higher rates of donation than places where drivers have to opt in.
Changing the framework for BruinCast in this way could potentially increase the number of lectures open to the public, spreading information and education in a way that’s consistent with the goal of a public university.
Other universities, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already have web-based broadcasts of lectures and course materials that are all open to the public. A large-scale effort from one of the premier educational institutions in the world is an important statement about the purpose of a university in the first place: to support learning no matter where it happens. That mission is doubly important for UCLA as a state institution.
Of course, there are challenges to implementing larger-scale public lectures. One salient issue that arises from making lectures public is copyright claims over the ideas professors present in their lectures.
Although the majority of professors using BruinCast at UCLA currently have their lectures set on private, a few do make them available to the public. Vinay Lal, an associate professor at UCLA’s history department, makes his lectures open to the public despite concerns about copyright and idea ownership.
“If I’m giving a lecture, I don’t see why I shouldn’t open it to the public,” Lal said. “I have a certain expertise and area of knowledge and I want to share that.”
Other UCLA professors, such as John Agnew, a professor of geography, disagree entirely.
“I think (public access to lectures) diminishes the experience of being a student on this campus,” he said.
Agnew said making lectures public reduces the exclusivity of a UCLA education. He believes online broadcast services like BruinCast should be supplemental and restricted to those students enrolled in the class.
But giving everyone access to the course materials for a university does not give them access to a degree. It is not the same thing to be enrolled at a university and to watch the lectures podcasted online, but people apart from those enrolled who watch the lectures can still benefit and learn something.
Making BruinCast an “opt out” system will encourage professors to open up their lectures to everyone while respecting professors who feel that posting their lectures publicly makes them too vulnerable to infringement of ideas, or who simply do not support an online format for education.
The idea of widely available education is a simple but powerful one that holds particular importance for public universities like UCLA. Making a simple structural change to the online broadcasting service here will help the university expand the positive impact it seeks to have as a state institution.
I definitely agree that BruinCast podcasts and webcasts should be public. I think it is a pity that even UCLA students cannot access some lectures from other classes if they are not enrolled in the class, preventing class auditing and learning for fun.