This is amazing. Just read about AcademicEarth.com in the weekly review of Jane Hart. This website offers thousands of video lectures from Universities like Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, … for free!
Their mission is simple:
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.
Last week I read an article in the NYT. It was about an israelian entrepreneur who wants to found the first free global university that will only exist in the internet.
“The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” said the entrepreneur, Shai Reshef, founder of several Internet-based educational businesses.
The name of this project is “University of the People” and you can already visit the website at http://www.uopeople.com/
According to Mr Reshef the university will have online study communities, weekly discussion topics, homework assignments and exams like every other online university. The big difference will lie in the tuition fees which are estimated at $15 – $50 / $10 – $100 depending if the student comes from a poorer or richer country.
But this is still a project a beautiful one though. So let’s have a look at AcademicEarth.com.
This site is still in beta but it already offers thousands of free video lectures from some of the world’s top scholars!
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.
The current list of Universities that offer content at the moment:
- Berkeley
- Harvard
- MIT
- Princeton
- Stanford
- Yale
You can find lectures of topics like:
- Astronomy
- Biology
- …
- History
- Law
- Mathematics
- Medicine
- …
I am truely amazed how the internet changes the way and the possibilities we learn. Offering first class education to basically everybody with an internet connection might be one of the greatest achievements of our generation.
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