With partnerships, University Channel bolsters service

Just over a year after the launch of the University Channel, program officials say they are pleased with its growing popularity and announced that Princeton will partner with three other colleges to bolster the service, benefiting public policy and foreign affairs aficionados who can watch the school's lectures and other content online.

The "channel," started by the Wilson School in 2005, is hosted online and provides the public with a downloadable wealth of video and audio feeds of lectures and panels by distinguished speakers from universities around the world. Colleges submit content of speeches and panels to the website, making it available to the public.

The popularity of the site has surged since its creation in the summer of 2005. University officials credited the channel's availability on Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store for the increase in viewership. Users have the option of either streaming the feed or downloading it to their computer or to a portable media device.

"People have told me that it has completely changed their commute," said Donna Liu, the channel's program director at the Wilson School. "It has made their car a learning platform." Once users sign up for an iTunes account, they can set the default to automatically download new podcasts from the channel's website.

"We are only limited on this site by our imaginations and what we want to do in terms of technology," said Jeffrey Patterson, assistant dean at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the three colleges now partnering with Princeton on the project.

Middlebury College's Rohatyn Center for International Affairs and Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs are also collaborating with the Wilson School.

The site now receives upwards of 650,000 hits per month: Fifteen percent from overseas, 10 percent from educational institutions and the rest from the general public, according to Liu.

The content focuses exclusively on public policy and foreign affairs, and Liu said she does not anticipate that the Wilson School will change that scope.

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"The role of the University Channel is that it focuses on current affairs — the problems of the world," she said. "If you expand it too much, then it becomes a YouTube."

Patterson attributed the success of the University Channel to its unique offering of intellectually vibrant content.

"It gives an opportunity for folks to locate a site that's extremely diverse in the sphere of public policy and public affairs. You don't really find that type of accessibility — that type of information anywhere else in the media."

Almost all significant Wilson School speakers make it onto University Channel, Liu said. Some speakers decline to be recorded either because of the sensitivity of their discussion or because they fear other schools will not pay them for lectures at those schools if speakers' lectures can be downloaded from the channel.