Educational podcasting: Why isn't Harvard doing more?

I've written about educational podcasting before, in the following two posts:


Stanford's Podcast Lectures

How podcasts can help in the classroom

But I am going to talk about it again. Tonight I listened to some of the material available through UC Berkeley's podcasting program, and have to wonder: Why isn't the Harvard Extension School, not to mention the rest of Harvard University, doing more with podcasting?

To be sure, the Extension School already has some podcasts available from a few computer science classes. But this is a fraction of the academic content that should be on the 'Net in podcast form, including classes, lectures, seminars, debates, and musical performances.

For other classes, it's not hard to create an audio file of a lecture. You can do it with a $15 microphone plugin for an Apple iPod, or buy a $30, self-contained digital audio recorder which can transfer the file to a computer. Students do this already, I see it all the time at the Extension School.

Once the file is created, it's easy to upload to the 'Net, if you have a Web server -- and Harvard has several thousand Web servers. Conceivably, an instructor or TA could take a digital audio recorder into class, press "record" at the beginning of the lecture, press stop at the end, and then hand it off to a technician the next day to turn the file into an mp3 and upload it onto a Web server. Students in the class could access them to review lectures at a later date. Students not in the class could check them out, to see if they want to register for the class, or learn more about the subject. Members of the public who would otherwise have no access to Harvard instructors could learn from the lectures -- MIT already puts all class materials on the public Internet with the Open Courseware Initiative, an extremely generous gesture which has benefitted people all over the world. Why can't Harvard take the initiative for once, with podcasting?