When Richard Ludlow was struggling in a linear algebra class at Yale, he scoured the internet for answers and stumbled upon a full video course available online from one of MIT’s mathematics professors, Gilbert Strang. He realized that there was an opportunity to create an easily accessible online platform for academic video courses and guest lectures, much like Hulu does for television content. As he did more research, he found that academic resources were grossly underutilized, as they were scattered across different sites and offered in varying file formats, making them difficult to find and browse.
So Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki. → Read More
A new video site featuring big thinkers from the worlds of politics, academia, science, and business launched today in beta. Called BigThink, it counts Peter Thiel and former Harvard president Larry Summers as investors. It raised an angel round in the low seven figures from South African VC (and lead investor) David Frankel, who invested personally, as well as Summers, Thiel, entrepreneur Tom Scott of Nantucket Nectars and Plum TV, and TV producer Gary David Goldberg (Spin City and Family Ties). The site is set up to as a place to find intellectual video snacks. Typically, each video shows a public intellectual or pundit against a stark white background answering a single pointed question in three to five minutes. Big Think launched with 2,000 clips from 85 “guests”, including Senator John McCain on the two-party system, psychologist Steven Pinker on human nature, and economist Paul Krugman on whether future generations will hate us. Summers and Thiel have their own videos (hey, they paid for the site). Even Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Engadget’s Peter Rojas have videos. (I’ve embedded Uncle Walt’s below, in which he debunks the notion that the Internet is a game-changer in politics). http://www.bigthink.com/swf/video_player_404x303.swf Even with 2,000 clips, the site can feel spare right now. But it should fill out fairly quickly. Founder Peter Hopkins tells me that he has another 100 hours of video already captured that needs to be edited, and the startup will soon commence a daily interview schedule. The quality of the videos is generally good, although the lighting makes some people like Mossberg and Richard Branson look pink. And some public intellectuals just should not be on camera no matter how smart they are. The site’s design does a good job of avoiding clutter, but the navigation needs work. It is hard to find all the videos from a particular person, for example. The whole site is designed to spark intellectual debate. Each video is designed to convey one important thought, and the audience can rate each video, vote on whether they agree or disagree, add their own comments, or suggest new ideas they would like to see discussed. “Going forward,,” says Hopkins, “we will be soliciting questions from the audience for invited participants and will be asking selected guests to respond to the feedback they receive from users.” Audience members can submit questions in writing, → Read More
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