Ever want to attend a world-class university like Stanford or Harvard but don't have the time, opportunity or grades? Now, thanks to the magic of podcasts, all you need is a portable audio player and an Internet connection to enjoy the growing body of online lecture courses provided for free by top colleges.

As the podcast snowball continues rolling - podcast users accounted for 12 percent of the Net's population in 2006 - universities are beginning to jump on the bandwagon. Now, everyday folks around the world can listen to lectures like "Geography of World Cultures," "The Historical Jesus" or "European Civilization From the Renaissance to the Present" during a jog or a long commute.

Top-tier schools, including Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley, offer many of their undergraduate courses online, while some Ivy League institutions, such as Columbia, Yale and Princeton, allow you to sample speeches, workshops and seminars by the likes of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and author Steven Levitt ("Freakonomics").

You may not be able to earn a degree, but you will be able to explore a new area of interest, freshen up your high school French or just impress someone at your next dinner party.

Berkeley's eventual goal, said Adam Hochman, project manager of the university's Webcast site, is to make nearly all lecture classes with more than 50 students into free podcasts. But providing such a wealth of information to the public requires a certain vision and generosity on the part of the university and individual faculty.

THOUSANDS OF HOURS

Berkeley has 2,200 hours of course lecture content available on its yearling iTunes U Web site.

To create this content, 82 professors agreed to pin on microphones during lectures for an entire semester. Hochman's team, including Berkeley students, screened each audio or video file for quality issues and copyright infringements, blurring whatever Berkeley did not have rights to release.

But some institutions are more wary of sharing too much. At Rutgers University, for example, a handful of professors do use podcasts and other multimedia content to teach, but they limit the use of these materials to registered students.

"The problem with courses is that (the university) can't always make (the contents) public," said Charles Hedrick, director of Internet Research and Technology at Rutgers, noting that lectures are the intellectual property of the professors who give them. "They don't have the rights to do it."

BECOMING ACCLIMATED

Rutgers is not alone in its trepidation. Yale and Princeton have released only lectures that were open to the public, shying away from posting full-length courses.

Still, the caliber of speakers at these institutions has drawn a broad and avid audience of listeners.

After Princeton launched its podcast site in January (uc.princeton.edu/main), the school's podcast ranked 25th among all of iTunes' selections and fourth in its education category - a warm reception for relatively wonky and unsexy material.

Most universities are still working out how they want to use podcasting as a teaching tool and whom they want to ultimately include in their virtual classrooms.

A certain amount of momentum-building is necessary, according to Hochman. Faculty need to become more comfortable with the multimedia teaching platform and with the idea that they may be broadcasting across the globe.

"A lot of faculty (understand) that publishing their content on the Internet is a great service for the public," he said.

He should know: Over the past year, Hochman has received letters of thanks from around the world, including one from a Mormon carpenter, another from a physics department of a Russian university and a missive from a U.S. Navy sailor deployed in Iraq.

"Your lectures have been a lifeline for me," the seaman wrote.

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VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS AND LECTURE HALLS

University of California at Berkeley: webcast.berkeley.edu

Stanford University: itunes.stanford.edu

Princeton University: uc.princeton.edu/main

Podcast portal: Universitychannel, a collection of lectures by figures from the world of law, politics, science and other disciplines

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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AP-NY-05-22-07 1501EDT