Academic Earth Gives you Learning Goose Bumps!

• Link to Academic Earth
• FAQs

WHAT?

Academic Earth is an educational video website with the goal of enhancing the usability and expanding the awareness of OER, focusing first on video lectures.

MISSION?
Giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.

OBJECTIVES?

• Centralizing the best video resources from multiple sources into one easy-to-search hub.
• Applying the latest best practices in usability and design.
• Integrating crowd-sourcing and wiki tools so users can enhance the experience for future users (these features to come).

WOW!

Currently, there are over fifteen hundred videos from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale there. As they are adding more every day, you can imagine the rest! Also, many lectures are grouped into courses, providing us added convenience to access. In addition, when the "Download to iPod" option appears you can download a QuickTime version of the lecture (click on the "Download to iPod" link and select "Save Target As..." or the equivalent for your browser).

Yes, they even allow you to grade (A, B, C, D) the lectures, which is quite cool. Lecturers are graded instead of learners or students. Wouldn't that be a cool school? We learn, no grades except for grading our lecturers. In other words, students can relax and learn, while lecturers get stressed out with their grades (for their lecturing ability). Though, I suppose they could add a comment feature to each lecture, enabling us to give our 23 cents when wanted or needed.

The interface is soothing and it is easy to find stuff (Playlist, Subjects, Universities and Instructors). Besides the normal embed and share feature, we are also provided with a 'Citation Info' feature, which makes it extremely easy for us to reference our lecture discoveries (replicate!). Interestingly, a 'Feedback' option follows us everywhere we go, indirectly reminding us of their eagerness to get feedback and improve further.

If I was allowed to grade this site, I would give it a delicious A. Surely, one of the best lecture finding sites (or lecture aggregators) I have ever visited :)