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.

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The site is set up to as a place to find intellectual video snacks. Typically, each video shows a public intellectual or pundit against a stark white background answering a single pointed question in three to five minutes. Big Think launched with 2,000 clips from 85 “guests”, including Senator John McCain on the two-party system, psychologist Steven Pinker on human nature, and economist Paul Krugman on whether future generations will hate us. Summers and Thiel have their own videos (hey, they paid for the site). Even Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Engadget’s Peter Rojas have videos. (I’ve embedded Uncle Walt’s below, in which he debunks the notion that the Internet is a game-changer in politics).

Even with 2,000 clips, the site can feel spare right now. But it should fill out fairly quickly. Founder Peter Hopkins tells me that he has another 100 hours of video already captured that needs to be edited, and the startup will soon commence a daily interview schedule. The quality of the videos is generally good, although the lighting makes some people like Mossberg and Richard Branson look pink. And some public intellectuals just should not be on camera no matter how smart they are. The site’s design does a good job of avoiding clutter, but the navigation needs work. It is hard to find all the videos from a particular person, for example.

The whole site is designed to spark intellectual debate. Each video is designed to convey one important thought, and the audience can rate each video, vote on whether they agree or disagree, add their own comments, or suggest new ideas they would like to see discussed. “Going forward,,” says Hopkins, “we will be soliciting questions from the audience for invited participants and will be asking selected guests to respond to the feedback they receive from users.” Audience members can submit questions in writing, in video form, or as audio slide shows. The quality of this back-and-forth debate is what will make or break the site. Either people will find the debate stimulating and keep coming back, or they won’t.

BigThink is competing for the same audience segment as Fora.TV (see our earlier post), which gathers a lot more video of public intellectuals, politicians, and business celebrities from conferences and other public-speaking venues and presents them in three-minute clips on its Website. Hopkins sees his effort more as YouTube meets Fora.TV. He says via e-mail:

I’m a fan of Fora and think they have a good approach to one aspect of making more high quality content available online. They saw the potential of capturing content as it’s made and making it available in that raw form. This gives them an incredible ability to scale their offerings. On the produced content front, we compete by offering content produced specifically for the 8-inch viewing experience. But, we don’t intend to match the scale of their produced offerings any time soon.

Where we differ and hope to distinguish ourselves is in the ability of the user to contribute actively and in the same manner as our invited participants. Whereas Fora is about delivering lots of high-quality content in one direction, Big Think is about using some high quality content to begin an exchange of ideas in two directions.

Fora has some interactivity built in as well in the form of forum discussions for each video. I think the real difference is that Fora’s content tends to be culled from longer speeches, whereas BigThink starts with the three-minute clip as its primary unit of production and consumption. One question is whether that is enough, or whether BigThink can come up a way to string its video microchunks together into long-form videos when warranted. That might not matter on the Web, but if BigThink ever wants to package its best videos for other formats such as DVDs or regular TV, it should figure out a way to do that now. Just a suggestion.

A bigger question is the ever-present YouTube factor and whether we even need a niche site for “smart” videos. Yes, you can find smart videos on YouTube, although they tend to have a different style. What would you rather see, this British professor blather on about the history of America or this “Drunk History” of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (embedded below) that is currently a top video on YouTube? That’s what I thought.

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