The University of California at Berkeley has been sharing webcasts of course lectures at their webcast.berkeley site since 2001. While these courses have always been available to both Berkeley students and the public alike, the university is reaching an even larger audience with the launch of their new UC Berkeley YouTube site. At the new site you’ll find over 200 videos separated into the nine courses (or playlists as they’re called on the site). The two courses with the most content, 55 videos between them, are the fall and spring sessions of Berkeley’s “Introduction to Nonviolence.” The class is described as “an introduction to the science of nonviolence…[and a] historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Check out all the courses and their available videos here.

While the YouTube site is great new resource, there’s still much to be found at the webcast.berkeley site, especially for those with an interest in history. Podcasts are available from History 167B – The Rise and Fall of the Second Reich; History 4A – The Ancient Mediterranean World; and History 5 – European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present. Meanwhile, the History Events section contains even more audio and video, like talks on “Islam, Global Politics, and U.S. Foreign Policy,” or the “Campus Forum: Implications of the War in Iraq.”

The webcast.berkeley site features both live (see schedule) and archived webcasts, and viewers can subscribe to new webcasts via RSS feeds (chose from individual courses or events). While the webcasts are free to all viewers, they do require the free RealPlayer software.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.