Academic Earth Goes Live

The open edu­ca­tion move­ment got a lit­tle stronger this week with the launch of Aca­d­e­m­ic Earth. Run by Richard Lud­low, a new social entre­pre­neur only a cou­ple of years out of Yale, Aca­d­e­m­ic Earth brings video lec­tures from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties into a cen­tral­ized user-friend­ly site. What you’ll see here is an impres­sive ear­ly imple­men­ta­tion of where Aca­d­e­m­ic Earth plans to go. Take con­tent-rich videos from uni­ver­si­ties, orga­nize the videos well, make the visu­al expe­ri­ence attrac­tive, add per­son­al cus­tomiza­tion func­tion­al­i­ty and the abil­i­ty to engage with the con­tent, and you have a very use­ful ser­vice to bring to the world. I first start­ed talk­ing with Richard back in the fall and am real­ly glad to see his site now ready for show time. Check it out in beta and watch it grow.