Academic Earth Launches Website Offering Free Video Lectures from Leading Universities

Academic Earth Launches Website Offering Free Video Lectures from Leading
Universities

Learners Around the World Gain Access to Academic Superstars

NEW YORK, March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Academic Earth, a social entrepreneurship
venture focused on expanding the availability of high-quality educational
opportunities for people around the globe, announced Tuesday the launch of its
website at AcademicEarth.org.

Academic Earth offers free access to online video of full courses and guest
lectures from leading educational institutions including Yale, Harvard, and
MIT.

"The internet now makes it possible to share with millions of people around
the world educational opportunities that were previously only available to a
privileged few," said founder and CEO Richard Ludlow. "Academic Earth is
dedicated to making it as simple as possible for anyone with an internet
connection to find, interact with, and learn from video lectures from
world-class scholars. This is an educational opportunity that has never
before been possible."

The catalog of video lectures, spanning nearly all major academic subjects,
contains 60 full courses and 2,395 overall lectures, for a total of more than
1,300 hours of premium educational video content. The lectures are presented
through a clean, user-friendly interface that allows visitors to browse by
Subject, University, or Instructor. Site editors have also compiled Playlists
such as "Understanding the Financial Crisis" and "Wars Throughout History"
that bring together lectures from a number of institutions to provide multiple
sources and perspectives on key issues.

In addition to full courses (a sample of which are listed at the end of this
document), the site includes guest lectures on leadership, business, and
policy from luminaries including Google Co-founder Larry Page, Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerburg, Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young, former Senator
Bill Bradley, New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman, and Blackstone
Chairman Stephen Schwarzman.

The impetus for the initiative came from founder Richard Ludlow's personal
experience as a student at Yale University. "I was having trouble in a linear
algebra course until I stumbled late one night upon a full video course
available online from MIT. Not only did I have access to supplementary
instruction, I got to learn from Professor Gilbert Strang, one of the most
renowned teachers in the field and the author of the textbook used in our
course," explained Ludlow. "This not only got me through linear algebra, it
also opened my eyes to a growing movement by universities to virtually open
the doors to the classrooms of some of their leading professors."

"There was a problem, however," he continued. "I discovered that these
resources were dispersed among many unconnected sites and available in varying
file formats, making them difficult to find and browse. That's the challenge
we have taken on with Academic Earth."

Ludlow believed that by bringing these resources together into a single
user-friendly educational ecosystem, applying best practices in video
technology and interface design, and giving tools for community interaction,
he could help spread these high-quality educational resources to a much larger
global audience. After graduating with simultaneous bachelor's and master's
degrees in economics from Yale, he deferred admission to Harvard Business
School to begin preparation for what became Academic Earth.

To raise the funding for the initiative, Ludlow initially approached Barry
Nalebuff - a Yale economics professor and the co-founder of Honest Tea - who
was his professor and faculty advisor at Yale. Professor Nalebuff came on as
the lead investor, and was joined by a diverse and accomplished group of angel
investors that includes a Pulitzer Prize winner, experienced tech investors,
and two additional Yale professors. Legal services for the funding round were
provided by the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich, and Rosati.

Preceding its full launch, the site opened a public beta in late January.
While the company's goal was primarily to test the site in a live environment
and get early feedback, the site experienced rapid viral growth due primarily
to visitors sharing the site on services such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious,
and StumbleUpon. The site attracted more than 68,000 unique visitors in
January and 200,000 unique visitors in February, with 50% of visitors coming
from outside of the US, representing 207 different countries.

Visitors have reported a wide variety of uses for the site. Students have
used it to supplement existing coursework, educators to study the teaching
methods of other instructors, and lifelong learners for personal enrichment.
Of particular interest have been the large collections of business, computer
science, and engineering lectures, which have been utilized by professionals
and job seekers.

Over the next six months, the company will integrate a variety of tools
intended to harness community intelligence to complement the existing content
and offer a rich learning environment. The first such feature is an A-F
grading system that allows users to rate the quality of each lecture. Coming
soon is an innovative Q&A system, which will allow visitors to ask questions
about a video to be answered by other users.

Academic Earth plans to grow its content base significantly over time, drawing
on open licensed content and direct partnerships with sources including
additional universities, think tanks, conferences, government agencies, and
educational television programs.

Academic Earth plans to introduce a monetization platform with the goal of
making the production and distribution of educational resources sustainable at
a time when many university programs are facing budget cuts. The company will
offer content providers the option to host content on a completely
non-commercial basis, or to share revenue generated through targeted marketing
of educational goods and services.

More information about university efforts to provide free educational
resources on the web can be found through the Open CourseWare Consortium
(ocwconsortium.org), and at the websites of Creative Commons content producers
including MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu), Open Yale Courses (oyc.yale.edu),
Berkeley Webcast (webcast.berkeley.edu), Stanford Engineering Everywhere
(see.stanford.edu), Stanford eCorner (ecorner.stanford.edu), Harvard Professor
David Malan (cs.harvard.edu/~malan) and Princeton UChannel (uc.princeton.edu).

Among the 60 full courses available on the site are:

Social Sciences:
-- Introduction to Psychology (Yale)
-- Financial Markets (Yale)
-- Game Theory (Yale)
-- Climate Change: Law and Policy (Berkeley)

Sciences:
-- Physics I: Classical Mechanics (MIT)
-- General Chemistry (MIT)
-- General Biology (Berkeley)
-- Human Anatomy (Berkeley)

Humanities:
-- Introduction to Ancient Greek History (Yale)
-- The American Novel Since 1945 (Yale)
-- Introduction to the Old Testament (Yale)
-- Milton (Yale)

Mathematics and Engineering:
-- Introduction to Computer Science (Harvard)
-- Introduction to Biomedical Engineering (Yale)
-- Linear Algebra (MIT)
-- Multivariable Calculus (Berkeley)

SOURCE Academic Earth

Richard Ludlow, +1-209-409-3836, media@academicearth.org