The internet is pretty great. And yet, somehow, it just keeps getting better. Case in point: today’s launch of Academic Earth. For those not yet up-to-date, Academic Earth is a brand new website that offers thousands of academic lectures from some of our country’s top professors, instructors and universities (Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Berkeley included). And get this, they’re all free.
Launched by Richard Ludlow, the new site offers an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface that sorts video lectures by subject, university, or instructor. And while still in it’s beginning stage, Academic Earth already features over 60 full courses and 2,395 lectures (amounting to over 1,300 hours of video content), and that’s just the start. In the future Ludlow also hopes to add content from think tanks, conferences and government agencies, including more lectures and more online courses.
Now, not to give Ludlow too much credit, most of these videos were already out there. However, for the most part, they were scattered across the web in different hidden corners and were a part of confusing and divergent interfaces. So Ludlow did the work of bringing them all together into one convenient and easy-to-use location and switching them all to an easy-to-view interface. Which — as I mentioned above — is just great.
Still — not to be too nit-picky — as of now the site is only available via video (albeit video you can download!). That’s nice, but it’d be even nicer is it was available in an audio format as well. That way you could listen to these lectures while in your car or as you’re working out. Cause, you know, nothing says “Let’s get in shape!” quite like an MIT professor talking Calculus. Or maybe that’s just me.
(Photo courtesy of LifeHacker)
Wow this is great. Not sure how great think-tanks would be though. Well, conservative think-tanks at least. Not exactly idea-machines.