Today, the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion has a good arti­cle on an emerg­ing trend — uni­ver­si­ties bring­ing their lec­tures to YouTube. As you’ll see, we get a men­tion in the arti­cle.

We first began dis­cussing this trend about a year ago. In this pub­lic radio inter­view aired last March, we talked about the sheer dearth of intel­li­gent video on YouTube and sug­gest­ed sev­er­al steps for rais­ing the bar. Close to a year lat­er, things don’t look much bet­ter. Yes, we’ve recent­ly found 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube. And we’ve even man­aged to assem­ble a “playlist” of intel­li­gent videos. But, regard­less, intel­li­gent video remains in very short sup­ply at the Google-owned video ser­vice. And the smart video that does exist is remark­ably hard to find, even though, rather iron­i­cal­ly, Google’s mis­sion is “to orga­nize the world’s infor­ma­tion and make it uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble and use­ful.”

This all stands in stark con­trast to what we’ve seen at Apple. On its own path to dom­i­nance, Apple has some­how carved out a space for high-qual­i­ty cul­tur­al con­tent. Even though ITunes is already a breed­ing ground for smart media, Apple launched iTune­sU over the past year, pro­vid­ing a plat­form for uni­ver­si­ties to deliv­er free lec­tures and cours­es to the larg­er world. (See our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es.) We prob­a­bly need to keep in mind that YouTube does­n’t have the same finan­cial moti­va­tions as Apple to accom­mo­date the intel­lec­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty. (Remem­ber, Apple made it through the dark years by sell­ing Macs to uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges.) But, even so, GooTube could smarten its offer­ing by tak­ing just a few small steps. How about mak­ing the so-called “Edu­ca­tion Sec­tion” include actu­al edu­ca­tion­al con­tent? How about let­ting seri­ous providers of cul­tur­al con­tent go beyond the 10 minute video lim­it? (Sound bites are inher­ent­ly lim­it­ing.) And how about fig­ur­ing out ways to give qual­i­ty scores to videos and help sep­a­rate the wheat from the chaff? Google fig­ured out how to make qual­i­ty dri­ve the way it orga­nizes the web. Sure­ly, it would­n’t be hard for Google’s big aqcui­si­tion to use sim­i­lar algo­rithms to orga­nize the video world.

In the end, it’s per­haps a mat­ter of time. Per­haps we need to sit back and wait for Google to put its stamp on YouTube. The merg­er is still fair­ly recent. And, his­tor­i­cal­ly, Google has­n’t been afraid to work with infor­ma­tion that has niche appeal. Nor has it run away from orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion that can be dif­fi­cult to mon­e­tize. Per­haps bet­ter things will unfold in ’08, but, based on what I’m see­ing, I’m not entire­ly opti­mistic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See our col­lec­tion of Busi­ness School Pod­casts, Law School Pod­casts, and Com­plete Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es.

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