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Richard Ludlow, the guy behind Academic Earth, was one of 2008 Finalists of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs organized by Business Week. The 22-Year-Old Yale University student has developed an educational online platform which features video lectures from some reputable scholars around the world and his goal is to make university lectures and course material widely available online so as to lower the cost of education worldwide since the there are all free.
Currently in beta, Academic Earth has thousands of videos on the site and there are categorized into popular subjects among students includes Astronomy, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Law, Medicine, and Psychology. Most of these lectures are from prestigious and world-class universities such as MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, and Stanford. Also browsing videos under the “Top Rated Instructors”, “Top Rated Courses”, “Top Rated Lectures” and “Top Rated Playists” is also possible.
I’m pretty impressed by this amazing and unique creation as it really helps students who don’t have deep pockets to gain access to the materials by these reputable universities. Academic Earth has already gain popularity because of its interesting and useful content which are tough to get. According to Richard Ludlow, he “plans to monetize other content—for instance, lectures from think tanks—with advertising deals, subscriptions, and sales of such related services as tutoring.”
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This is an exciting idea. One of the big pushes around the world is to encourage young people to explore entrepreneurship as a career choice. Global Entrepreneurship Week, which was celebrated for the first time this past November, was a key component of this effort.
One of the challenges to entrepreneurship is to understand a problem well enough to find a solution. This resource sounds like it could benefit students and others from around the world. Though I am a baby boomer doing business development for other baby boomer entrepreneurs, I will certainly watch this resource and learn from it.
Thanks for sharing that Academic Earth is available.
Shallie Bey
Smarter Small Business Blog
It is also a good place for developing countries to get an idea of how these top university professors lectures.