Academic Earth Aims at Free Universal College Education
Movies, TV shows and podcasts have been readily available online for years, and as syndicating content becomes even easier, internet users can get even almost anything online – but full college courses?
That’s the goal of Academic Earth, an online hub featuring full video lectures and entire courses from some of the nation’s top schools. The idea grew out of a smaller project at MIT that helped out Academic Earth’s CEO and founder Richard Ludlow when he was struggling with a linear algebra class at Yale his junior year.
Since graduating in 2007, Ludlow has merged the best of the MIT program with a site developed at Yale, Ted.com, into a vast online directory of academic resources. Besides working with MIT and Yale, Academic Earth partners with Stanford, Berkeley , Princeton and Harvard.
The site, now in Beta version, is expected to launch by the beginning of April with an onslaught of new features being added over the next six months, said Ludlow.
Outside of including several schools, Academic Earth’s biggest challenge will be utilizing user feedback and interaction to take their product one step further than programs already available. The small but growing team at the New York-based company is developing a social network around their content, where users can interact with professors and other students, make suggestions and complaints, and organize their own course load. Ludlow has already used user feedback for ways to make the site more user-friendly.
“A big step that we’re taking is segmenting these lectures into shorter clips,” Ludlow said. “I see this as a video encyclopedia.”
Ludlow also hopes to see an expansion in partnering schools, subject matter and international connections. Many schools have video lecture content, he said, but are not licensing their content in creative commons, which would make it available for free for non-commercial purposes. Ludlow is hoping the attention to his site, which had 100,000 visitors in the first 16 days, will convince Universities to include their content and to expand the subject matter.
“As our site gains notoriety, (universities) will see which subjects are lacking,” he said. Ludlow hopes to include content from several schools in the United Kingdom and encourage other international universities to partner with Academic Earth on providing foreign language content.
Down the line, Academic Earth even plans on packaging information in DVDs so those without internet access can still gain from their product.
Users can access lectures and courses from a range of subjects – mostly sciences, for the time being – and rate lectures and professors. Despite the site providing full course information, Ludlow isn’t worried that students will opt for online versions of in-person lectures.
“There will always be some value in the in-person experience that you have in college,” Ludlow said, comparing the lecture videos to text books. “Just delivering information can be commoditized. This actually opens up the door for teachers to use more information.”
The Jon Stewart Show Explains Twitter
Below is a great segment from the Jon Stewart show on Twitter. In the clip he gently mocks the trend of politicians and media types jumping on the new media bandwagon in a search for relevance. Found on Venture Beat.
Why is Team Obama Opting Out of Twitter?
Last week the Politico released a controversial list of the most influential Twitter users in the Washington, DC area. The article spread around the Internet, as is typical of these types of articles, with the the LA Times and David Almacy responding with their own lists. All three lists are interesting, and sort of equally good/bad in their own way.
The only thing that really sparked a strong reaction in me was the inclusion of Barack Obama’s Twitter account as #4 in the original Politico list. Obama was almost certainly included due to the fact that he is followed by over 345,000 Twitter users, making him the most popular Twitterer in the world. I question Obama’s inclusion for two primary reasons:
- His team hasn’t posted an update since the inaugaration a month and a half ago.
- Even when they were posting, his Twitter account was pretty boring, consisting almost solely of updates from staff on his schedule and new features on his website. There are a few tweets that purport to be from Obama himself and are written in the first person. However, these first person tweets seem designed to be devoid of personality.
If you review his account, it is pretty clear that Team Obama is using Twitter almost solely to drive traffic to their website.
I find this interesting. Others, from Downing Street to Claire McCaskill to John Culberson to Shaquille O’Neil have shown how Twitter can be used by government, politicians and famous celebrities to achieve a variety of goals (transparency, building connections, etc.).
Team Obama ran what was undoubtedly the best web campaign in the history of the world. I am positive that people within the campaign understand Twitter, and that they could use the platform in groundbreaking ways if they wanted to.
I think it is pretty clear that they are basically opting out of Twitter.
My question is pretty simple: why?