Lisa Zhu | Creative collaboration

Many Penn students (read: haters) tend to harbor a certain disregard for our peer institutions, as exemplified by basketball fans' over-enthusiastic trash-talking at basketball games and the obligatory groan-plus-rolling-of-the-eyes reaction whenever anyone mentions the word Princeton.

But if we can put aside our contempt for just 50 minutes at a time, we can watch one of dozens of fascinating talks posted on Academic Earth (www.academicearth.org). The new Web site consolidates full lectures from professors at several prestigious universities (before you ask, no, Penn is not one of them) into one centralized location, and makes them available for viewing by all audiences.

The concept behind Academic Earth is not new - OpenCourseWare initiatives have been in place for several years already at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but increasingly more schools are joining the movement. The philosophy of OpenCourseWare is charmingly idealistic and populist, in a nerdy way - access to the Ivy League education experience? For people all across the world? And it's free? Fantastic!

While the issues surrounding sharing intellectual property are slightly more nuanced, the natural reaction, is, of course, let's sign up! Not only would we be contributing to the worldwide reserve of intellectual capital, but we'd also be promoting our own image - "This would improve Penn's global brand as an institution that supports higher learning around the world," said chairwoman of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education and College junior Alex Berger. (And maybe reduce the instances of our being mistaken for Penn State.)

Even better, adopting the OpenCourseWare initiative would increase Penn's social impact around the world - do I need to mention how important this is to the University? For instance, MIT has reached out to educational institutions in developing countries through its existing OpenCourseWare program. According to Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, MIT gets 2 percent of its Web traffic from sub-Saharan Africa due to technological constraints - understandable given the region's lack of infrastructure. Because of these problems, MIT donated over 200 external hard drives containing all the academic material it has posted online to universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. By installing the hard drive on the university's local-area network, Carson said, "the students and faculty can access the information at the same Internet speeds that you and I enjoy."

Alas, the complexities of the OpenCourseWare program have prevented Penn from adopting the initiative just yet. Specifically, concerns about intellectual property and funding mechanisms have resulted in the discussion getting bogged down in the College Hall bureaucracy.

"Obviously it's not something that's going to be an easy culture shift at Penn," Berger said. "Many professors are - rightly so - very protective of their own intellectual property."

But others have no qualms with making some of their lectures available for the public. Real Estate professor Susan Wachter, for example, gave a talk on the financial crisis at Princeton and was surprised to find it available for viewing on Academic Earth. "I'm perfectly okay with it because I gave it as part of a public-lecture series. . The research which it cites is already in journals." However, Wachter also notes, "I don't know if we should make all our notes and lectures public. It's a slightly different question, and I'm not sure if I'd be totally comfortable with that."

Despite these concerns over intellectual property, MIT has been operating its OpenCourseWare initiative since 2002 with few problems. "The gifts that the faculty have made to us is such a public and available gift," Carson said. "Any misappropriated material is noticed very quickly by our viewer community and is reported back to us immediately."

More problematic may be the issue of funding. Recording large numbers of lectures and posting them online is not cheap - MIT OpenCourseWare, for instance, costs almost $4 million a year to operate, according to the program's Web site. Carson added that about half that funding comes from their provost, but getting Penn's administration to commit to such a hefty sum may be difficult.

Sadly, this means that I cannot satisfy my burning desire to view professor Stein's latest Microeconomics lecture any time soon. I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with watching Mark Zuckerberg's "Entrepreneurial Skills Learned" on Academic Earth, courtesy of Stanford University.

Lisa Zhu is a College and Wharton senior from Cherry Hill, N.J. Zhu-ology appears on Thursdays. Her email address is zhu@dailypennsylvanian.com

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.