YouTube EDU launched today, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities” according to a short blurb on the YouTube blog. The official announcement is apparently tomorrow.
The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good). Other content, not so interesting.
Just a couple of days ago we covered Academic Earth, a site that aggregates useful educational content (”Hulu for education”). Both of these sites are great ways to spread learning.
Interesting to note that lots of school districts block access to YouTube so this content won’t be easily accessible to high school students.
Use the upload video facility of Multiply.com – you can use a YouTube URL. Problem solved.
Not problome solved Multiply.com is blocked to. xD
I like it very much
Great idea, I’m guessing they’ll probably create channels like these for multiple categories. In my opinion Youtube would be more valuable if it was somehow better segmented.
Lighten up, Francis.
The question is how many businesses they just killed with this move, and how hard it is to now target other verticals? My guess, few just lost their business model and as they see this a success, many others will later. The lesson is it’s unlikely to succeed when duplication is few clicks of a mouth away by others. There are of course few exceptions to the rule.
Cheers
Sahar Sarid
Bido.com – Social Auction Platform
few clicks of a MOUSE away by others ..
Very interesting. Great questions Sahar!
This would be good, once the school’s unblock Youtube.
Wow, AcademicEarth.org is far superior. Way to be asleep at the wheel, YouTube, letting a small startup show you up in every aspect!
Youtube.com/edu is way better because it’s STREAMING.
Academicearth is probably still using shared hosting or dedicated at best.
STREAMING is available on shared AND dedicated, YouTube SHARES their STREAMING on Akamai.net, right along with GOOGLE and APPLE. You really don’t know all that much about networks, NOCs, or the Internet, do you, Luke?
It doesn’t matter if I know networks or not. I know that youtube.com/edu is a better product because I can click jump.
Most of academic earth lecture are like 50 min long, if i want to watch the 40 min mark, I have to wait. Academic earth basically took existing video and put it in a hulu look like frame.
ooo this makes me happy=) http://tr.im/hNWG
I hardly would call a specific set of search results, which this basically is, a new launch of a website…
Hi Guys, what do you think about http://www.vide...ical=Technology
At Videonym our aim is to promote good quality videos and provide multiple access paths (through tags, categories, semantic info etc) to videos. We generate concepts, tags, categories for a video in addition to those provided by authors.
Videonym is hosted on Google App Engine and currently supports Youtube gdata apis. We plan to support to other video hosting sites in future.
I think it’s spam.
It would be good if they also have other segments apart from education but I think its a good move.
Looks OK, but where is OUR school, College of Lake County – at the very least our Library has released a few over the last six months, there are a good number from some of our social clubs, John Tenuto (raving StarTrek Philosopher) – there is no mention in the TechCrunch article no on the YouTube site on how a school becomes a "partner" with YouTube.com/EDU. Any ideas here?
Why just higher ed institutions? So many more institutions and individuals are involved in teaching and learning and creating online learning materials! This is an old idea of where teaching and learning occur.
Shame not to see YouTube’s UK partner’s represented. The Open University channels have almost 1 million views and loads of our videos are the most popular in the category of education (alongside some less traditionally educational materials it has to be said!). Agree with Beth Harris that lots of great learning and teaching occurs outside universities – would be great to highlight some examples of great educational videos from other places. I guess this is what the education category in YouTube is for.
This stuff can be fantastic for educational purposes. I just hope we don’t dummy down our society with videos and we forget how to read, or teach our kids how to read….
The nice thing is that some universities like Stanford are using Creative Commons Licenses on their videos, checkout the “Download” option some of those videos have!
Very cool, I wish they opened CC licensing for everyone, but for now this feature is only available to few producers that are part of the beta program, like Stanford
Google/YouTube is WAY behind iTunesU with the whole lecture series thing (Stanford was first on board with them). So, really not much surprising here. UNLESS, we can use annotations on these videos, THEN I will be seeing something extraordinary.
Hi, you can annotate YouTube videos.
No, you are not allowed to annotate the EDU videos. Which is why I brought that into the discussion.
nice information. i hope i can find some educational content that related with my education.
I am sorry but this looks boring compared to the student and teacher videos that are created directly like them. Its like they are just catching up. Next thing they might do is use the mobile iphone thingy to make the cool texts poup LOL!
I really expected better from Standford
“…the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good…” and those are ripped from the iTunesU segments. And the Stanford ones are the first, and some of the best. Unless you are referring to the newer YT-exclusive lectures, the iTunesU ripped ones are way better than you think – you have not seen those yet.
TechCrunch, get your act together on the comments here – if there are over 50 comments, then where are the rest? There is no NEXT button. And stat thinking about making your site compatible with Opera and SeaMonkey.
I applaud the effort , We can see how free information has changed the face of the world through internet.These things should be actually encouraged
This news is amazing, and the courses i found is wonderfull and i hope it’s not blocked to my country by any means or by the call of copyright or anything else .
Great way to broaden the access to learning and critical for our knowledge driven economy…