UC Berkeley restricts access to 20,000 videos on public online lecture database

Now, you will have nothing to fall back on when you miss a lecture

The University of California at Berkeley has an online public database of lecture videos on topics ranging from computer science to climate change to public health, but instead of continuing to provide these resources, the university has decided to cut funding and restrict access to these materials.

Thus, students who relied on Berkeley’s YouTube channel to fill them in on what they missed at their last lecture, or non-students just trying to learn a new skill will experience a huge loss.

Now, why would the university decide to make such a cut?

The answer comes from a Department of Justice decision last year that the online resources provided by institutions of higher education is in direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They recognized that students who are blind, deaf, or otherwise sight or hearing impaired, cannot enjoy the benefits that online lectures offer. The university’s course of action followed in an attempt to address the concerns that this federal review brought forth.

Because the federal review found that some videos lacked automated captions or had low color contrast, the university decided that it would be too resource-intensive to caption everything and opted to just take down everything.

Similar issues with lack of accessibility arose at Harvard and MIT, who faced lawsuit. The lawyer who represented the National Association for the Deaf in the lawsuit was himself from Oakland, California and remarked that a change in the policies of Harvard and MIT could impact other university’s policies, as we see in the case of UC Berkeley.

On March 1, Cathy Koshland, UC Berkeley vice chancellor for undergraduate education, sent out a campus message explaining the shift. Among the reasons she cited were: “This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from ‘pirates’ who have reused content for personal profit without consent.”

Thus, the federal review wasn’t the sole reason for the shift, as reducing internet piracy was also a factor.

Nevertheless, thousands will be affected by this policy, and much of the public knowledge in the form of experiment demonstrations and PowerPoint presentations from some of the world’s best instructors will be lost.

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