# Closing down Virtual University of Pakistan index


I came across the Virtual University of Pakistan's YouTube collection in
[May
2010](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/05/21/the-virtual-university-of-pakistan-has-6000-hours-of-video-lectures-on-youtube/),
and was amazed at the almost 6,000 videos in Urdu, but frustrated that
it was so difficult to find courses, because all the videos were dumped
into one big collection, with no individual course playlists, etc.

As a fun hack, I wrote a [Ruby
script](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/05/21/the-virtual-university-of-pakistan-has-6000-hours-of-video-lectures-on-youtube/) that
accessed the YouTube metadata programmatically and generated a very
bare-bones index of the course videos, by course. I published this at
http://reganmian.net/vu. Despite the simpleness of the page, it quickly
became one of the most popular pages on my website, and brought in a
large amount of visitors from Pakistan. During the last 2 years, the
page has had more than 14,000 visits. But now the time has come to
retire it.

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VU-index.png "VU index")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VU-index.png)

The reason is that it is no longer needed. I first heard about
[VUTube](http://www.vutube.edu.pk/) through a comment on my blogpost,
this seemed like a similar "external effort" to mine, though much more
thorough and nicely designed. However, the real change is that the
Virtual University themselves have created [a beautiful and very
user-friendly website](http://http://ocw.vu.edu.pk/) listing all the
courses, as well as much supplementary information.

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VU-OCW.png "VU OCW")](http://ocw.vu.edu.pk/)

I am looking forward to following the Virtual University of Pakistan, as
it develops in the future!

Stian