YouTube recently made available a new channel on their site called YouTube EDU. The channel is the result of work by Google employees using their time to make academic content from universities on the popular video site more easily available. The videos are further separated by school. Popular school channels include Harvard Business School, the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, Purdue University and UC Berkeley. The academic relevance of each school’s channel varies, but the amount of academic content is tremendous.

The lecture topics run the gamut from guitar lessons to anthropology lectures to an MIT course on quantum physics. For viewers seeking out lectures on specific topics, YouTube EDU provides a search utility that filters out non-educational content. Many of the lectures are full hour-length classes on film. The UC Berkeley channel offers up an hour and a half guest lecture by the Dalai Lama among 600 other videos.

Lectures have been posted on YouTube for years, but several YouTube EDU university channels have grouped together lectures to create entire courses. Yale University’s channel boasts 13 full courses, each with 20 to 25 hour-long videos. Offering full courses in easy-to-use chronological order undercuts the fractured nature of making single lectures available out of context. YouTube EDU offers over 200 of these full courses.

A similar site was launched recently called Academic Earth. It also provides free video lectures from top schools across the nation. While watching these videos is not quite the same as being in the classroom or engaging in discussion, the sheer amount of quality education available for free is a landmark achievement and attests to the value of technology in education.

Here is one of the more popular lectures series on YouTube titled “Physics for Future Presidents”: