One of the strengths of post-secondary education in the U.S. since the earliest days of its structuring under the influence of Dewey and others was its broad availability. Rather than being an option in a single version available only to a few, Dewey envisioned higher education taking many forms and being made available to a wide range of interests, abilities and budgets.

This approach has just made another advance with the partnership between UC Berkeley and YouTube:

UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.

The process was begun with Google a year or so ago and has proved to be very popular. About 200 lectures have been uploaded, ranging from anatomy to physics, providing instruction from semester-long courses offered on the UC Berkeley campus. Last year these lectures were viewed 1.3 million times, downloaded over 700,000 times and have been viewed in 72 different countries including places as far away (in physical terms) as Tibet.

Professor Muller, one of the earliest users of web-posting, believes this is just the beginning of a new and exciting dimension to higher education:

"I have a deep belief we're on the edge of something," Muller said. "The technology in the past wasn't quite there, but now it's here and it's going to transform a great deal in education."