Academic Earth is a website that aggregates online video lectures of some of the top Universities. The same folks that are interested in watching TED Talks may also be interested in watching some lectures from Academic Earth. Not only can you watch a video and learn more about a topic, you can watch the whole series as if you were auditing the class.
Universities involved include Berkely, Columbia, Harvard, Khan Academy, Maryland, Michigan, MIT, Norwich, Notre Dame, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, UNSW, USC, Villanova, and Yale. They have top-placed links for Online Bachelor’s degrees, courses for credit, Master’s degrees, and professional certificates but once you get beyond that, you can search by subject, universities or instructors. There area also lists of top-rated courses and top-rated lectures and by creating an account, you can create a playlist of the lectures you’d like to view.
The videos are streaming via their Flash-powered player. You can make the video go full-screen or just ‘dim the lights’ to make the rest of the site go dark and make the video stand out. Of course, all the other standard Web 2.0 components are there as well: You can share the video, get the embed code, download a copy, and even get the citation information.
Turning it around on the instructors, you can grade the class to rate it A, B, C, D, or F. It’s this information that contributes to those top-rated lists.
If you’re looking to expand your noggin a bit, whether you’ve already been through college or not, you should check out Academic Earth for some engaging videos that can expand your knowledge in other disciplines.