Watch Educational Videos Offline with YouTube

It’s another good day for the open education movement. As part of an experiment, YouTube has partnered with a select number of universities (Stanford, UC Berkeley, Duke, MIT and UCLA) to make lectures, courses and other videos available for free download. This gives educators and lifelong learners the freedom to watch educational videos offline, whenever and wherever they want, including airplanes or classrooms with limited connectivity. The videos (all high-resolution mp4s) can be watched on any computer loaded with QuickTime and also on many portable devices, including newer iPods. When I spoke with the YouTube team today, they flagged another perk: the videos are being distributed under a Creative Commons license, which means that you can reuse them under certain non-commercial conditions.