Academic Earth provides a social wrapper for freely available course videos
Where can you find over 1,500 lectures from some of the top universities in the nation? http://www.academicearth.com.
Academic Earth does not however produce any content. Just like wikipedia, youtube, facebook and a host of other services have leveraged user generated content, Academic Earth is hoping to do the same for college lectures. Academic Earth’s, ”goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.” (http://academicearth.org/about)
What Academic Earth brings to the table are a set of social and organizational features that make the content already recorded and provided by Universities more powerful and interactive. Users can “grade” lectures and then view an average grade, allowing the best content to float to the top just as YouTube does. Interestingly I did not find a feature that allows users to comment on the videos in-line. Instead, Academic Earth provides a rich set of social linking tools to share and discuss lectures.
However, Academic Earth will face some stiff competition for users from at least two other players in the social media game. http://www.youtube.com/edu is offering their video platform to colleges and universities and ItunesU is already an established distribution system. Whoever enables users to interact with this free content in the most engaging and interactive way will be a long way toward capturing this user base.
