When Richard Ludlow was struggling in a linear algebra class at Yale, he scoured the internet for answers and stumbled upon a full video course available online from one of MIT’s mathematics professors, Gilbert Strang. He realized that there was an opportunity to create an easily accessible online platform for academic video courses and guest lectures, much like Hulu does for television content. As he did more research, he found that academic resources were grossly underutilized, as they were scattered across different sites and offered in varying file formats, making them difficult to find and browse.
So Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.
This isn’t a radically new idea. Fora.TV and BigThink both offer intellectual video content online. iTunes U hosts a lot of university content as well. Unlike Big Think, Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content. And Fora.TV seems to focus more on speeches and public lectures. But Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures. You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days (if your brain can handle it). My one complaint is that for an academic site, it doesn’t seem to engage the user via forums, comments, social networking features, or ads. Ludlow says that all of these features and applications will be introduced slowly.
The interface of Academic Earth is simple and no frills but Ludlow plans to roll out additional features, such as a YouTube-like commenting system for videos. Users will be encouraged to ask questions about the content of videos, with the hope that other users (or scholars) will answer them. Ludlow says that the site will try to make money by advertising for educational goods and services such as tutoring and continuing professional education, and will share revenue with content providers. Ludlow says universities will have the choice of opting in to commercials and advertisements. In addition to the current university sources, the site will be adding content from think tanks, conferences, and government agencies. Also, lectures can be dry and boring to watch. Academic Earth lets you download the videos, but sometimes all you want is an MP3 with the audio so you can listen in the car or on a run.
Slick interface and useful tool. It will be a great resource for people especially in developing countries.
Well done.
These talks are very short and limited.
CharlieRose.com, Ted.com, or the atgoogletalks channel on youtube are way better resources.
I think this serves a different purpose. All the sites that you mention are also great resources, but this one is focused on university level educational topics.
For someone who have neither the funds or the opportunity to study at an Ivy league school, this is a tremendous resource, and we should give credit where credit is due.
In my book, AcademicEarth represents all that is good and incredible about the Internet in its potential to bring people together instead of driving them apart. It is the Internet on its best day.
From India
Anjali Sen
You might want to check out SciVee (http://www.scivee.tv/) for another science-oriented video website. Unlike the above websites though, scivee’s focus is on publications (where the scientists explain their research in a video).
I think Academic Earth could be huge. Check out these early metrics from their soft launch at SlideShare: http://www.slid...c-earth-metrics
Pretty impressive.
Follow me now @ http://twitter.com/IanMikutel
There’s also swiss project replay:
http://www.replay.ethz.ch/
which is part of
http://www.open...astproject.org/
which claims: “The Opencast community is a collaboration of individuals, higher education institutions and organizations working together to explore, develop, define and document best practices and technologies for management of audiovisual content in academia.”
I checked out this site and am loving it so far.. it’s something that I definitely will be going back to from time to time.
A suggestion I would like to make is to show the length of each video in addition to the title.
I love Academic Earth. I found it a little while ago, whilst stumbling around blogs, and immediately lost an entire weekend on CS50 lectures. That was hugely helpful because I’m switching to second year CS next year, and I’m sure all that stuff is hugely helpful.
The site is a great idea. I went and found two videos I wanted. This is one of them http://academic...s/david-swensen. The problem tho, its 900mb file to download.
If you read thru the source and then dowload the .flv file. It is still 250mb.
Its just to high, it would be good if they had smaller versions of the same video. Perhaps the flash feed is smaller.
Im not trying to be negative, as the site is a great concept! Free good quality education for the masses is nothing to frown upon.
There is an option to download the lectures as a podcast, both video or audio. That might solve your problem.
This is a great idea, truly rare now a days. I wish i had this during my college years instead of the dysfunctional, incompetent and angry professors I ended up with in college.
I not only like this concept, but I also like the idea of Hulu for other areas. It’s no revolutionary and others are doing similar things but I think Academic Earth is doing a great job of it. User-created content is fine, but I like having sites I can go to where the focus is quick and easy streaming videos that are easily sorted and high quality. The layout of Hulu and Academic Earth is also great. I’d like to see more copy cat sight, and maybe a great standup comedy site. That would be a dream come true.
edits first line note* and second to last line sites*
“you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f*ckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library”
now Will Hunting can take his classes at MIT instead of just being a janitor.
I’ve been listening to the lecture on Greek history for the past few weeks. Love it. And this site. “This is what the web was invented for” and all that.
This is a great site. I’ve been using it for months now.
a great site i watched a lot of the computer science classes being a self taught programmer
What a great site.
The UN has something like this. Not slick interface and uses RealMedia, nonetheless, there are lectures from the top/leading legal folks (ICJ Judges, professors from Yale, Harvard, and so on) around the world.
http://www.un.org/law/avl/
Click on “Lecture Series”
Gunnar
Yeah, with SHITTY lectures. Academic Earth rules and I’ve been using it for awhile now.
Academicearh.org is great. I’ve been watching Bob Shiller’s finance class and it is fantasic.
this combined with mit opencourseware could be a great resource looking for educational tools to supplement their learning… check out MIT opencourseware here ocw.mit.edu
Those links don’t hold a candle to AcademicEarth, with its better content and better interface (which is going to dramatically improve as it gets more exposure, it’s still new y’all)! Believe it, this site is going to be huge, the soft launch numbers are only the beginning. Watching talk about Thomas Friedman talk about economics right now. Nice work covering this.
We’ve been doing this since 2007 at:
http://www.auditoriumA.com
Great reviews from CNET’s Webware (Rafe Needleman) and PC Magazine’s App Scout among others.
whoever was comparing some other sites, they are completely different, they are discussions on issues but are not educational and instructional, this site is all about providing course material and lectures to anyone who wants to use them
This sounds like a great idea, but how will they continue to keep the universities happy? I mean, the university is footing the bill for the content…
Wow…this is going to be big. How does that make a student at one of these universities feel, though? Especially one that is paying upwards of 50K/year to attend?
You can download hundreds of free courses from great universities at Open Culture. This list mostly includes courses in audio. Download them to your mp3 player and go.
http://www.ocul...inecourses.html
I don’t think actually having the material is really going to hurt anybody that much. You can walk in to a large lecture at any school and usually get away with sitting there.
What you don’t get is the signalling device: the degree from the institution that produced these lectures. Without that it makes little difference.
I just wanted to say thank you for making me discover this site. Being a high school senior in a miniature school (30 kids in the graduating class), not much choice in classes are offered. Now I can follow the computer science classes with this, and all the material (handouts, homework) are available online! This allows me to completely follow the course except there are no grades, but that doesn’t matter to me.
Again, thank you!
Love it. But completely don’t get it. Here’s the quote above:
“Ludlow says that the site will try to make money by advertising for educational goods and services such as tutoring and continuing professional education, and will share revenue with content providers.”
Here’s what every video I saw on the site has for licensing terms:
“Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike”
Um, non-commercial. So explain to me that business model again??
For people interested in similar content I’d highly recommend checking out LearnOutLoud’s directory of free audio and video learning resources:
http://www.lear...Video#directory
They’ve done something similar to AcademicEarth in terms of aggregating content that previously was pretty scattered (albeit with a less pretty UI
.
I am glad that universities are actually allowing to post these videos to public, instead of being stingy (like mine is).
This is excellent. I hope other universities join in also and make knowledge universally accessible.
http://www.youtube.com/edu
youtube has a better version of it.
You want the site to “engage the user via … ads”? I hope you’re kidding. Explain to me exactly how advertisements “engage the user”, or enhance learning for that matter. Advertisements on a supposedly educational site are nothing more than an annoyance and a distraction whose sole purpose is to turn site visitor’s attention into profits.
Fora.tv and YouNoodle/BigThink AND AcEarth rely to heavily on Beet.tv. Beet.tv is not comaptible with MOST browsers, and their use of flash is questionable. iTunesU beets the competition with a stickam.
The UI is really nifty – I adore the concept. I visit the site often when I feel boring at home.