The students of Pacific Tech clearly see a bright future, where the whole world becomes the classroom for students whose college experience keeps them too busy to attend lectures.

Welcome to the new trend of eLearning called "coursecasting" or the Podcasting of collegiate lectures for students and, often, for other individuals who aren't ready for the commitment of a $20K tuition bill each year.

The Chronicle of Higher Education questions the need for students to even show up for class. While they note that "most of the professors who have started 'coursecasting' view the technology as an accompaniment to live lectures, not a replacement for them," they go on to profile Natalie Simpson, an associate professor of management at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

But Ms. Simpson, an associate professor of management at the State University of New York at Buffalo, uses eLearning Podcasting as a distance-education tool. While a few dozen students show up regularly for one of her courses, hundreds more watch lecture recordings on their iPods and visit the lecture hall only to take tests. Ms. Simpson says her Podcast gives students more scheduling flexibility without hurting their grades. 

Ms. Simpson isn't the only one jumping on the coursecasting wagon, either, as UC Berkeley is now joining Stanford in offering a growing number of lectures through iTunes. What is remarkable is that, like Stanford, UC Berkeley is offering their content for free.

This semester, webcast.berkeley has offered 30 eLearning courses as Podcasts, including "Foundations of American Cyberculture," "Introduction to Chemistry," "Wildlife Ecology" and "Introductory Physics." 

Like Ms. Simpson of SUNY, Berkeley professors are finding that making their eLearning courses readily available by Podcast is getting them feedback from such far-flung places as Sweden, India, and China.

One can definitely applaud the idea of making information readily available to the masses, as it will certainly open a lot of doors to both official and unofficial students. However, in a couple quarters we'll have a better idea about whether being able to time-shift your lectures will create a more conducive enviroment for learning. Quite possibly, it will just give those enrolled in the course one more thing to procrastinate and then cram in before the final.