Academic Earth Helps You Educate, or Get an Education

Think Hulu, but for nerds. TechCrunch has the scoop:

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.”

And here is a description from their web site:

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

That’s right, lots of lectures to listen to! Every nerdlings dream! The selection is somewhat limited at this point (merely an aggregate of what is already out-there on the web), and there does not appear to be a way for smaller academic organizations to easily participate, but this shows great promise, and in the future could be a great way to “get the word out” about great teachers.

In the mean time, why not learn more about Ancient Greece, the Pluto Problem, or measuring space and time.

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1. A Guide to Using Zotero in Biblical Studies: Collecting, Annotating and Citing Bibliographic Data

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