UC Berkeley Course Captures
| UC Berkeley Course Captures | |
| Status | Offline on March 16, 2017 |
| Archiving status | Saved! |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| Project source | https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/archive-ucberkeley-webcast.git |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) (formerly #berklost (on EFnet)) |
| Project lead | User:Znak |
On 2017-03-15, the University of California, Berkeley began to delete or put behind authentication nearly a decade's worth of "course captures" (recordings of lectures, audio and video) that had previously been public. There were tens of thousands of files on YouTube and iTunes U, dating from 2006 to spring 2015. The removal affected these public channels that we know of:
- https://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley (empty as of 2017-10-17)
- https://itunes.apple.com/institution/uc-berkeley/id354813951 (gone as of 2017-03-16)
- http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series, an index of links to YouTube and iTunes (as of 2017-03-16, redirects to coursecapture.berkeley.edu, which is behind CalNet login)
Archive Team and others managed to save nearly all of the to-be-removed content from both YouTube and iTunes U. It is all now preserved at the Internet Archive:
The YouTube videos are actually still present at youtube.com, but are now private and unlisted, requiring a CalNet login to view. The playlist metadata that links together the multiple videos of a course is gone. The iTunes U course content is completely gone, with or without authentication.
Since fall 2015, new course captures have been private by default. See #How to preserve recent course captures for information on how you can help preserve them, if you have a CalNet account.
Archive organization
The files archived from YouTube are organized with one item per video, and one collection per playlist. Collection identifiers look like ucberkeley-webcast-playlistid and item identifiers look like ucberkeley_webcast_videoid. Example collection: Sociology 1, 001 - Fall 2012.
The files archived from iTunes U are organized with one item per playlist (iTunes or RSS feed), and multiple audio/video files within the item. Item identifiers look like ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_itunesid. Example item: Practice of Art 8 - Fall 2014. The filenames are constructed as track. YYYY-mm-dd - title.ext, and characters like / that would cause problems in a filename are hex-escaped, URL style. For example: 04. 2006-01-25 - Lecture%2fDialogue: Intelligence Comes in Many Flavors.mp3. The naming convention is an attempt to make sorting by filename preserve the lecture order, but it doesn't always work, because of occasional missing/duplicate track numbers or dates that are out of order relative to the track numbers (the RSS date doesn't always match the lecture date).
In many cases, there are both YouTube and iTunes U versions of the same course. iTunes U often has both an audio and a video version of the same course.
The results of this archiving effort ended up in the ucberkeley-webcast collection. There are a few other places where related videos have ended up:
- A ucberkeleylectures collection (predating this archiving effort) that contains 26 audio items.
- 82 courses in the generic "movies" collection, all having a title that starts with "UCBerkeley Course". These unfortunately lack metadata beyond a course number (they don't even say what year or semester).
- 18 courses uploaded by @arxivist.
How to preserve recent course captures
We managed to preserve all the content that was public at the time of the shutdown, which was everything up through spring 2015. However, since fall 2015, course captures have been private by default, and are similarly at risk of being lost. Also, a minority of videos before fall 2015 were not made public. If you have a CalNet account (an @berkeley.edu email address), then you have the ability to download and preserve videos.
Requirements:
- A CalNet account (email address ending in
@berkeley.edu). - yt-dlp
- Knowledge of how to run programs from the command line.
See #coursecapture.berkeley.edu for the status of downloading recent course captures.
Set up YouTube OAuth access
In order to download private videos from the command line, you need to enable OAuth authentication for the YouTube API. You only have to do this once. The outcome of this step is a client_secrets.json file.
- Sign out of any Google account that may be signed in. (Or use a private browsing window for the following steps.)
- Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/projectcreate and sign in with your CalNet credentials. Create a new project. The name doesn't matter. I used archive-ucberkeley-webcast.
- Select your new project. (The name of the currently selected project is at the top of the page.)
- Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/library/youtube.googleapis.com/ and click Enable to enable the YouTube Data API v3 API.
- Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials/consent and set the Project name shown to users. The name doesn't matter; this is only for your own personal use.
- Now go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials and click Create credentials, OAuth client ID, with type Other. Again, the name doesn't matter.
- Back on the Credentials screen, under OAuth 2.0 client IDs, click on the ⤓ download button. Save the file to
client_secrets.json.
Make a list of video URLs
- Go to https://coursecapture.berkeley.edu/ and find the course you want.
- Copy and paste all the URLs for the course and put them into a plain text file
urls.txt, with one URL per line, like this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g7P49utu58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xed5Zg7MEFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7RbmGXyMs
If you are a programmer, you may prefer to work with machine-readable data rather than copy and paste. See coursecapture.berkeley.edu-20180706.json under #Indexes of files for a pre-parsed scrape of https://coursecapture.berkeley.edu/. Here is an example of using jq to extract the video URLs for one course:
jq -r '.courses[]|select(.name == "STAT 20" and .term=="Spring" and .year=="2017").videos[].url' coursecapture.berkeley.edu-20180706.json
Download the videos
In this step you will use the client_secrets.json file to generate an OAuth token, which you will then provide to yt-dlp.
- Download youtube-oauth2.py. (This program is also included in the #Archiving scripts. It requires the oauth2client library (
pip install oauth2clientorapt install python-oauth2client). - Run youtube-oauth2.py once to generate
credentials.json. This is an interactive process, but once you have done it, you don't have to do it again until your token expires. You can change the path~to wherever you wish to store theclient_secrets.jsonandcredentials.jsonfiles—just don't put them where you might accidentally upload them.python2 youtube-oauth2.py ~/client_secrets.json ~/credentials.json
You will see a prompt like this:
Open this URL in a browser, sign in, and paste the code. https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?scope=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fyoutube&redirect_uri=urn%3Aietf%3Awg%3Aoauth%3A2.0%3Aoob&response_type=code&client_id=..client_id..&access_type=offline code:
Open the URL shown by the program in a web browser, sign in to your CalNet account, approve the access to YouTube, and finally it will show you a code. - Paste the code into the
code:prompt. If everything worked, the program will output a line that starts withAuthorization: Bearer. This is your temporary OAuth access token. You don't have to save it; now thatcredentials.jsonexists, running yt-dlp again will produce an equivalent token, without having to paste a code again.
Finally, run yt-dlp, providing it with your list of URLs. (See the YouTube page for more information about yt-dlp options.) In the command line, we call youtube-oauth2.py again, using the cached credentials.
yt-dlp -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" --continue --retries 4 --write-info-json --write-description --write-thumbnail --write-annotations --all-subs --ignore-errors -f best -a urls.txt --add-header "$(python2 youtube-oauth2.py ~/client_secrets.json ~/credentials.json)"
When the download is finished, check to make sure there are no .ytdl, .part, or .part-Frag* files among the downloads. Their presence indicates an incomplete download. Delete them and run the download command again. yt-dlp will not re-download any videos that are already complete.
Bulk parallel downloading
download-coursecaptures-parallel.sh is a script that automates the extraction of video URLs from coursecapture.berkeley.edu-20180706.json and runs multiple parallel copies of yt-dlp to download them. (You can get all the necessary files from the repo under #Archiving scripts.) You'll need to set up OAuth as described under #Download the videos.
Status
All the files from both YouTube and iTunes have been preserved and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The "x"s in the tables below are, for the most part, the videos that we downloaded in all available YouTube formats. Others have downloaded more videos (though perhaps in fewer formats); see #Archiving efforts. YouTube comments were not preserved, unless someone else at #Archiving efforts got them.
If you would like to continue the work, see #How to preserve recent course captures. Another thing you can do to help is to find and link course home pages and other materials. Lots of courses have online slides, homeworks, practice exams, etc. At least for EE/CS courses, there's a good archive of past course home pages at https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html. When you find a course home page, leave a review on the Internet Archive page with a link to it.
coursecapture.berkeley.edu
There is an index of YouTube videos at https://coursecapture.berkeley.edu/ that goes back to Fall 2008. It substantially overlaps with #YouTube playlists, #YouTube videos in semester playlists but not course playlists, and #YouTube videos without playlists, but the coverage is not identical. The YouTube-sourced lists go back farther in time, to 2006; but the coursecapture.berkeley.edu list has videos since fall 2015 and also older videos that were not made public on the YouTube channel.
- At this point, most videos were public and are already archived.
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2008
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2009
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2009
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2010
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2010
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2011
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2011
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2012
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2012
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2013
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2013
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2014
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2014
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2015
- Since fall 2015, videos have been private by default.
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2015
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2016
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2016
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2017
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Fall 2017
- UC Berkeley Course Captures/YouTube Status Spring 2018
YouTube playlists
These three courses were erroneously split across multiple playlists. As of 2018-02-14, all of the videos had a review at the Internet Archive cross-referencing the other playlists.
| playlist | downloaded | uploaded |
|---|---|---|
| Public Health 150E, 001 - Spring 2015 (14 videos) | archive.org | |
| Public Health 150E, 001 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org |
| playlist | downloaded | uploaded |
|---|---|---|
| Computer Science 198, 032 - Spring 2015 (6 videos) | archive.org | |
| Computer Science 198, 032 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org | |
| Computer Science 198, 032 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org | |
| Computer Science 198, 032 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org |
| playlist | downloaded | uploaded |
|---|---|---|
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (13 videos) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | x | archive.org 2 |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (2 videos) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (1 video) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (3 videos) | archive.org | |
| Cognitive Science C103, 001 - Spring 2015 (2 videos) | archive.org |
There are 28 semester-long playlists whose constituent videos are almost a subset of the individual course videos found above. There are just 61 videos, most of them private, found in the semester-long playlists that are not accounted for above. Except for the exceptions listed in the table below, we don't have to download the videos of these playlists (we already have their metadata).
- Spring 2013 Courses (116 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2013 Courses, Part 3 (199 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2013 Courses, Part 2 (198 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2013 Courses, Part 1 (193 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2012 Courses (14 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2012 Courses, Part 4 (200 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2012 Courses, Part 3 (194 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2012 Courses, Part 2 (185 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2012 Courses, Part 1 (88 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2012 Courses (105 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2012 Courses, Part 3 (199 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2012 Courses, Part 2 (190 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2012 Courses Part 1 (192 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2011 Courses (88 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2011 Courses Part 4 (198 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2011 Courses Part 3 (196 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2011 Courses Part 2 (198 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2011 Courses Part 1 (191 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2011 Courses (68 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2011 Courses Part 3 (199 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2011 Courses Part 2 (199 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2011 Courses Part 1 (194 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2010 Courses (169 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2010 Courses Part 2 (199 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2010 Courses Part 1 (199 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2010 Courses (85 videos) archive.org
- Spring 2010 Courses (1) (197 videos) archive.org
- Fall 2009 Courses (25 videos) archive.org
YouTube videos in semester playlists but not course playlists
There are 61 videos that are found in the semester-long playlists that don't have their own individual course playlist. As of 2018-02-14, all of the videos (except the ones that were private) have a review at the Internet Archive that cross-references the other videos in the course.
YouTube videos without playlists
playlists-20170307.json and uploads-20170307.json cover almost the same set of videos, but not quite. playlists has 9,881 videos and uploads has 9,897. Their union has 9,953 videos and their intersection has 9,825. There are 56 videos that are in playlists but not uploads, and 72 videos that are in uploads but not playlists.
Of the 72 orphan videos that were in uploads but not playlists:
- 31 are duplicates or near-duplicates of other videos that were in some existing playlist (and already archived under that playlist). In some cases, title changes like "Full version will be available soon"→"Low audio" suggest that the orphan videos are preliminary versions that were later replaced by better versions.
- 9 have an existing playlist where they would fit well; it looks like they were just omitted due to an oversight.
- 32 had no matching existing playlist. Of the 32:
- 17 constitute EE40, Summer 2010, whose Lecture 15 and Lecture 19 were mistakenly filed (and previously uploaded) under the EE240, Spring 2010 playlist.
- 4 are from ECON115, Spring 2014.
- 1 is from PSYCH160, Fall 2013.
- 10 are non-course videos.
iTunes U
We have downloaded all of the 1,174 iTunes U items, except for two whose files are 404.
Because of its length, the table of iTunes U status is in a subpage: UC Berkeley Course Captures/iTunes Status.
Archiving scripts
Some source code to assist in archiving. The repo also includes #Indexes of files.
git clone https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/archive-ucberkeley-webcast.git
See the README for some usage hints. Although there are some YouTube-related scripts, they weren't actually used to download most of the YouTube videos; that was done by someone else.
Indexes of files
These files contain links to media downloads as well as valuable metadata.
- playlists-20170307.json
- JSON list of UCBerkeley channel playlists from the YouTube API. Each line is a
playlistsresource, with the addition of an array ofplaylistItemsresources, which are the individual videos in the playlist.
- uploads-20170307.json
- JSON list of all uploads of the UCBerkeley channel from the YouTube API. The format is the same as playlists-20170307 (there is only one line because "uploads" is treated as its own playlist). playlists-20170307.json and uploads-20170307.json almost completely overlap in the videos they contain, but there are about 125 videos that are only in one or the other.
- https://gist.github.com/Wundark/5a56ee2c9e49d441646ad2a6e7a2c0c0
- List of YouTube videos, from a Reddit thread.
id354813951.tar.xz(missing a few videos)id354813951_2.tar.xz- Index of iTunes files. To download the video/audio files for a lecture, first fetch the URLs containing
downloadTrackfrom course.json. This returns some XML containing a second URL (and some metadata) which points to the actual download location. All these requests need to use the iTunes user agent string ("iTunes/12.5"works).
- itunes-minus-youtube-20170304.txt
- List of 729 iTunes downloads that don't seem to be among the YouTube playlists (by comparison of course titles). It was produced like this:
jq -j '.id,"\t",.snippet.title,"\n"' indexes/playlists-20170307.json | sort | uniq > youtube.txt tar -O -xf indexes/id354813951_2.tar.xz --wildcards -- '*/course.json' | jq -j '.storePlatformData."product-dv-product".results[]|(.id,"\t",.name,"\n")' | sort | uniq > itunes.txt ./dedup-youtube-itunes.py youtube.txt itunes.txt > indexes/itunes-minus-youtube.txt ./dedup-youtube-itunes.py youtube.txt itunes.txt
- id354813951_2-rss.txt
- RSS feed URLs for each iTunes item. These RSS feeds download from wbe-itunes.berkeley.edu rather than from iTunes directly, which is reportedly faster.
- webcast.berkeley.edu-series-20170301.html.gz
- HTML of http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series on 2017-03-01. The page is dynamically generated using JavaScript, so the HTML is taken from the inspector in a browser after the page has loaded. The page contains links to YouTube and iTunes.
- coursecapture.berkeley.edu-20180706.json
- A parsed crawl of https://coursecapture.berkeley.edu/ on 2018-07-06. This is an index of YouTube links for courses, including post-2015 ones. The format is:
{
"date": "2018-02-25 22:10:40",
"courses": [
{
"name": "BIOLOGY 1A",
"term": "Spring",
"year": "2010",
"section": "001",
"instructors": "Gary L. Firestone, Jasper D. Rine, Jennifer A Doudna",
"videos": [
{
"title": "Biology 1A - Lecture 1: Course introduction. Introduction to macromolecules.",
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRiokVd-ID8"
},
...
]
}
]
}
Sample commands for working with JSON indexes (using jq):
jq -j '.id,"\t",.snippet.title,"\n"' indexes/playlists-20170307.json- Extract all playlist IDs and titles. Convert an ID into a URL as: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=id.
jq -r '.items[].snippet.resourceId.videoId' indexes/playlists-20170307.json- Get a list of all video IDs in playlists-20170307.json. Convert an ID into a URL as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id.
jq -r '.items[].snippet.resourceId.videoId' indexes/uploads-20170307.json- Get a list of all video IDs in uploads-20170307.json.
Unlisted/private captures
Since after Spring 2015, course captures have been by default unlisted or private behind authentication. Course captures from past semesters (going back to 2008) are indexed (but require a CalNet login) at
Course captures from current courses (may only be available to students actually in those courses) are at
Videos that don't seem to be listed in any of the other lists:
- John Searle - Philosophy of Mind, Spring 2011 / Philosophy of Society, Fall 2010 / Philosophy of Language, Fall 2010 (from http://www.openculture.com/philosophy_free_courses)
Auxiliary information for courses for which we otherwise have videos:
- CS 10 Fall 2010 - YouTube playlist
- CS 61B Spring 2016
- CS 189 Spring 2016 with Jonathan Shewchuk; course home page. (From a Hacker News comment.)
- Foundations of Data Science Spring 2016
- CS 160 Fall 2016
- Foundations of Data Science Fall 2016 - YouTube playlist
- CS 61B Spring 2017
- The "Webcast Departmental" YouTube channel hosts some unlisted videos—though they are, of course, unlisted, even when authenticated, so you can't get a list of them.
- The "Webcast-legacy Departmental" YouTube channel hosts some old videos, not sure what their relation to the rest is.
Archiving efforts
- October 17 2016 (YouTube): https://np.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5804np/youtube_archiver_and_uc_berkeley/
"And lastly I finished downloading all of the UC Berkeley. Videos, any transcriptions/captions and all other video info. I made a torrent as they are the most efficient at sharing. All 3.1TB of it, it's not hosted on the fastest server, but with a few seeds it should go quick enough. If you want to keep this great learning resource alive, feel free to seed or partial seed, I will seed it for as long as I can. [4] For video listings please look at this list [5]."
- March 2 2017 (YouTube): https://www.reddit.com/r/YouTubeBackups/comments/5x4kv8/ucberkeley_to_remove_10k_hours_of_lectures_posted/
"Currently pulling down to a few locations in parallel at 720p."
- March 5 2017 (YouTube): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5x3o51/ucberkeley_to_remove_10k_hours_of_lectures_posted/dejmb1c/
Already started uploading to the Internet Archive, about 75 courses so far. Uploads are in zip format (the videos don't play in the in-browser player).
"I'm mirroring it to archive.org, 1.2TB in on
Sun Mar 5 18:04:31 GMT 2017" -
March 2017 (YouTube/webcast.berkeley.edu):
According to #berklost IRC, "Waybackmachine is already grabbing these." Additionally, webcast.berkeley.edu has been crawled by archivebot: http://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/domain/webcast.berkeley.edu
- March 9 2017 (iTunes): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5yflnr/half_the_berkeley_webcasts_being_removed_on_march/
"VERY IMPORTANT PSA, many of the lectures are only available on iTunes, not Youtube, and have to be downloaded manually! We should get started on that ASAP."
- March 13 2017 (YouTube): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5z2499/many_of_the_uc_berkeley_youtube_videos_still_need/
"Everything has been accounted for and is in the process of downloading, thank you to everyone who helped, especially lawpetex who backed up the full amount of all the Youtube and iTunes content!"
- March 15 2017 (YouTube only—confirmed on Slack): https://lbry.io/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued
"We copied all 20,000 and are making them permanently available for free via LBRY. The full catalog is over 4 TB and will be synced over the next several days."
Shutdown notice
2017-03-01
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
Cathy Koshland, UC Berkeley vice chancellor for undergraduate education, sent this message to the campus community today:
Dear Campus Community,
I wanted to share with you the decision to restrict access to our legacy Course Capture (classroom lecture) videos and podcasts, currently searchable at webcast.berkeley.edu and found on YouTube and UC Berkeley iTunesU, to members of the campus community.
As part of the campus’s ongoing effort to improve the accessibility of online content, we have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features. Our public legacy libraries on YouTube and iTunesU include over 20,000 publications. This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU 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.
Since fall 2015 we have piloted publishing all of our Course Capture content behind CAS/CalNet authentication. This strategy has enhanced our ability to accommodate students and UC Berkeley community members who have demonstrated an accessibility need, and we have concluded that authentication is an intervention that is appropriately responsive to the Berkeley community.
We will continue to evaluate the role of online Course Capture and distribution in tandem with advances in technology befitting the No. 1 public institution in the country. Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org). This free and accessible content includes a wide range of educational opportunities and topics from across higher ed.
Beginning March 15, 2017, access to iTunesU course content will be suspended. On the same day we will begin the process of moving the publicly offered YouTube content made from the current legacy channel [youtube.com/ucberkeley] to a new authentication login required channel. The entire process is expected to take three to five months. During this time the ETS team will migrate the videos into the new channel behind CalNet/CAS authentication. Berkeley users seeking to view this older content will be able to access it by logging into YouTube with their bConnected/Google-supported identity.
To help manage the instructional impact, instructors with legacy content have been contacted. Instructors utilizing the ETS Course Capture service since fall 2015 will experience no changes in viewing or accessing content.
Enrolled Berkeley students requiring accommodations will continue to receive support through the Disabled Students Program.
Finally, as we continue to strive for inclusion and effective teaching and learning for all members of the campus community, we encourage you to reference a new campus website designed to help instructors identify best practices and techniques in creating accessible course content for all users: accesscontent.berkeley.edu.
For additional information, please review this FAQ document.
2017-02-24 http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-capture-content/[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
Here is additional information to assist the campus community and the public with upcoming changes to UC Berkeley’s library of legacy public Course Capture (classroom lecture) content from webcast.berkeley.edu, located on YouTube and UC Berkeley iTunesU.
- Who uses this content? How much of the content is used/watched?
- Course recordings are a study-tool for current students. Results from a recent review of our legacy (2006-2015) public course recordings on YouTube show that the average video is watched for less than eight minutes.
- Who are the “pirates” mentioned in the CalMessage?
- Pirates is a term used to describe websites that embed YouTube content without the permission of the original copyright holder for profit. UC Berkeley legacy Course Capture content has been discovered on for-profit websites, which use either a subscription fee or on-page advertising.
- Why now? Is this related to the DOJ letter?
- UC Berkeley stopped posting course lecture videos publicly through webcast.berkeley.edu in 2015 as a way to reduce costs and increase adoption. However, we left legacy content from 2006-2015 in place. The Department of Justice letter indicates that they believe our legacy Course Capture content from webcast.berkeley.edu and located on YouTube and iTunesU is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. We are removing the legacy webcast.berkeley.edu content from public access to focus on making future public content more accessible. Instructors are encouraged to reference accesscontent.berkeley.edu for best practices and resources for making course content accessible.
- If we don’t add captions and descriptions, what happens?
- Failure to meet the expectations of the Department of Justice could mean potential legal and financial ramifications.
- What about current students who need captioning?
- ETS and the Disabled Students Program (DSP) have been partnering over the last several years to identify courses requiring captioning based on student need. The partnership and support of students working with DSP will continue.
- What will happen to the recordings?
- Beginning March 15, 2017, iTunesU Course Capture content will be removed. You may continue to use/download course capture content until that date. Other content in this location such as events, KALX and Public Affairs content will remain available after March 15. On the same day ETS will begin moving the publicly offered YouTube course capture content from the current legacy channel [youtube.com/ucberkeley] to a new authentication login-required channel. The entire process is expected to take three to five months. Berkeley users seeking to view this older content will be able to access it by logging into YouTube with their bConnected/Google supported identity. Instructors with course recordings on YouTube recorded fall 2015 or later will experience no change. Individual video URLs (links) will remain unchanged. Instructors currently using impacted recordings are encouraged to contact the Course Capture team to identify ways to mitigate any effect on their courses: coursecapture@berkeley.edu
- How long will videos be interrupted?
- The entire process to migrate the public YouTube videos from their current location to a new YouTube channel that will be accessible with campus member’s bConnected/Google supported identity will take 8-10 weeks and begin on March 15, 2017. Each video will be unavailable on bCourses for 2-3 business days. If you are a current instructor using impacted legacy recordings please contact the Course Capture team to review your needs: coursecapture@berkeley.edu
- If I have other videos that I want to get captioned or audio described, how would I do that?
- While speech-to-text tools continue to improve, effective captioning remains a very manual process. The UC System has recently introduced contracts with several vendors to provide captioning services.The vendor transcribes a recording and adds the text to the appropriate YouTube video, or a transcriber may be hired to caption an event live. At UC Berkeley, content created/captured by Berkeley Video and Berkeley AV is now being captioned. Information on audio description best practices are available at: https://webaccess.berkeley.edu/resources/tips/audio-description and https://webaccess.berkeley.edu/ask-pecan/descriptive-audio
- I’m using the impacted recordings (iTunesU or spring 2015 or earlier YouTube content) in my course now. What should I do?
- ETS is working hard to mitigate impacts to current instruction. If you already have a list of your video links, you have no additional steps to take. Video URLs will remain unchanged. If you need assistance or have additional concerns, please contact the Course Capture team to review your needs: coursecapture@berkeley.edu
- I am an instructor who is using impacted recordings (iTunesU or spring 2015 or earlier YouTube content) for something outside of UC Berkeley. What should I do?
- If you are an instructor using legacy recordings currently available to the public as an extension of your research or teaching, please contact the Course Capture team: coursecapture@berkeley.edu
- Why was the public not notified before webcast.berkeley.edu content disappeared so that we had a chance to download iTunes legacy content?
- We added notifications to our sites and provided a warning before content began to be removed. The legacy content on webcast.berkeley.edu located on YouTube and UC Berkeley’s iTunes U is three to ten years old.
- I am a Berkeley instructor who wants to use old content in my class, where can I find the URL to share with my students?
- Before videos are migrated: Instructors can copy/paste their YouTube links for future reference. Link URLs will remain unchanged. Educational Technology Services (ETS) is working to modify webcast.berkeley.edu so that videos are accessible to UC Berkeley CalNet users starting in April Instructors with immediate questions can contact the Course Capture team: coursecapture@berkeley.edu
- Can I get a copy of my old lectures from YouTube to use personally?
- Currently, ETS doesn’t have a service that provides copies of recordings to individuals.
- I am a Berkeley CalNet user, so why can’t I search for videos and playlists that I used to be able to see on webcast.berkeley.edu?
- The process that allows us to place the videos behind authentication removes playlists and content search options. ETS is working to provide campus users a new website that will function as a directory of recordings that should launch sometime in April on the existing webcast.berkeley.edu site.
- Can I still find previous events and other non-Course Capture recordings on YouTube?
- The public UC Berkeley Events Channel (youtube.com/ucberkeleyevents) will continue to be available. Many recordings at this location are already captioned and plans are in place to caption future content.