If you’ve always dreamed of stepping into the portals of the University of California, Berkeley, in your quest for a degree, here’s the next best thing to actually learning on campus. The university has tied up with Internet search giant Google to offer free videos of its course lectures and special campus events to the entire Internet fraternity through Google Video.

With more than 250 hours of high-quality videos, UC Berkeley earns the distinction of becoming the first university to feature its own page on Google Video. "Physics for Future Presidents, "Integrative Biology," and "Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business" are a couple of examples of the topics you can find on the UC Berkeley page. The site also boasts a variety of public events and cutting-edge symposia on a broad spectrum of topics from climate change to synthetic biology, with more content scheduled to be uploaded over the coming months.

Posting free lectures on the Internet is going by the name “coursecasting” these days and is gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds.  Audio and video lectures on iPods and handheld devices seem to be the in thing nowadays. Is attending classroom lectures becoming passé?