David Malan

The buffering hadn't really been invented yet.

Certainly downloading those videos was by design not possible.

But with podcasting, of course, you could download the assets in advance.

And for our own students, the vision was that they could listen to the class only on audio at the gym or during their commute and just generally make the educational content a little more accessible.

A year or two later, Apple released the video iPod.

And so we very much steered into that and downloaded those same assets, but in video form to make them available on the video iPod and people's Macs and later PCs.

And we were fortunate around that time, early 2000s, where Wired Magazine took notice and noted for us that we were among the most popular podcasts in some category.

And it was kind of news to us that people cared.

We did know that we were starting to see bandwidth problems.

In the very early days, we were using DreamHost to host podcasts.

the mp3 files and dreamhost had i think free accounts but only up to some number of megabytes per month and we kept hitting the threshold and so what we would do is sign up for another dream host account another dream host account another dream host account and we would use like dns trickery to just reroute the r the urls in the rss file to the new web host

to keep up.

And so that's when all of our attention sort of was drawn to the possibilities and that we can make available this content, not just for our own students, but for anyone else who either geographically, socioeconomically couldn't access that same kind of class.

Yeah.

And that alone was a touchy subject on campus at first, because here we were giving away the very thing that other people were paying for.

But at the end of the day, what people are paying for is the additional support structure you get in a more traditional environment, the more traditional credentialing, the transcript and the credit and so forth.

But the knowledge itself, it does society no good to withhold that, I think.

Lectures, no.

Some of our social content, yes, insofar as we are producing, in addition to the course's traditional in-classroom content, things that are designed clearly for social media, whether it's interviews, for instance, whether it is excerpts from CS50's fair, this exhibition of final projects, whether it's steering in the directions of some popular meme just to sort of catch the attention of our own students or new students.

But we have been very deliberate over the years from the beginning, and especially since the age of the MOOC in 2012, when Coursera and edX and other platforms were coming around to not steer into this bite sized three minutes, five minute chunks that.