Take Ivy League College Courses for Free at AcademicEarth.Org

I am always looking for awesome online sites that have great free access! My favorite sites teach us something new or bring to light new ways of thinking about subjects we already know. Academicearth.org is an especially good new site because it gives all of us the opportunity to watch/listen to over 1500 videotaped lectures from some of the best universities in the U.S.A. for free! How wonderful is that? No, you can't get college credits for watching them, but you can soak up the knowledge of an Ivy League education for free. I call that quite a deal!

Currently, six Ivy League universities have videotaped lectures on the AcademicEarth.org site. These universities are: Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Yale. The subjects covered in these videotaped lectures are: astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, English, entrepreneurship, history, law, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religion.

For those of you who are already falling asleep after reading those first two paragraphs, take heart! There are some really interesting subjects covered under those categories. If you look under the Playlists tab at the top of the homepage, you will find such lecture series titles as, "Love is in the Air," "Living a Good Life," "Social Entrepreneurship 101,"and "Taking Risks and Learning from Failure." There really is something for everyone at AcademicEarth.org. If you register on the site (free), you can save your favorite lectures, and download most of them.

Who came up with the idea for AcademicEarth.org? His name is Richard Ludlow and he is a 22 year old entrepreneur who graduated from Yale. He created AcademicEarth.org to provide an online hub for university courses that can be accessed worldwide. In theory, if such coursework is available for free, it will help drive down the cost of higher education worldwide. He intends to fund the site through advertising and addition of pay-for services, such as tutoring ¹.

Do you think you are too busy to take advantage of AcademicEarth.org? You can download the videos and watch/listen to them at your leisure. I am listening to a lecture on the Civil War by a distinguished Yale history professor as I type this.

Who can benefit from AcademicEarth.org? Anyone! My father LOVES to debate. I might download some content for him, just so he can watch/listen to some of the videotaped philosophy lectures from this site! I know he would thoroughly enjoy them!

Sources:

1. "Academic Earth," BusinessWeek, images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0908_2008_entrepreneurs/3.htm

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