September 14, 2009. CCNMTL announced the launch of the Columbia University channel on YouTube EDU this week, giving faculty, students, and the public access to videos of Columbia-produced lectures, events, and promotional content on YouTube. The new channel, which already showcases 95 videos, enables Columbia professors and administrators to publish and share videos online using YouTube’s free educational platform.

YouTube EDU centralizes videos from over 100 universities and colleges in one convenient place and includes over 200 full course videos from leading universities, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale, and, now, Columbia. The platform offers a more robust set of features than regular YouTube channels, allowing videos to run longer than 10 minutes on a Columbia-branded, ad-free site. Features like annotations, tagging, and high definition also enhance the viewing experience, and videos can be easily embedded in blogs, wikis, or course sites.

"Columbia's channel on YouTube EDU exposes to the world some of the terrific happenings in the classroom and on campus. We invite the University community, especially instructors, to contribute to the site, taking advantage of many of the channel's unique social software and educational features,” said Maurice Matiz, vice executive director and director of technology at CCNMTL.

The launch of YouTube EDU follows the successful deployment of Columbia on iTunes U, which was released in fall 2008. Over the past year, more than 5,000 tracks have been added to the University’s iTunes U site— 70 percent of which are course-related. CCNMTL hopes to achieve similar success with YouTube EDU. Visit Columbia’s channel on YouTube EDU at https://www.youtube.com/columbia.

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Download the press release (PDF)