Videos of university courses

February 4, 2009 2:59 PM

Academic Earthcollects lectures on a wide variety of subjects from UC Berkely, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale that the universities have released under Creative Commons. The site is still in beta so it doesn't quite have the thousands of lectures its frontpage promises. It has many full courses, for example Benjamin Polak teaching game theory, Amy Hungerford on the American novel since 1945, Charles Bailyn's introduction to astrophysics, John Merriman on the history of France since 1871, Shelly Kagan on death and Oussama Khatib's introduction to robotics.
posted by Kattullus (10 comments total)

Wow awesome. So glad to see someone do this finally.
posted by stbalbach at 3:44 PM on February 4

Seconding the awesome.
posted by doctor_negative at 3:50 PM on February 4

Awesome, thanks.
posted by Rykey at 3:55 PM on February 4

Thank you. Watching now.
posted by joe lisboa at 4:00 PM on February 4

Awesome, love it. (Is there a version of this for podcasts?)
posted by DU at 4:12 PM on February 4

Well, there's the phenomenal iTunes U.
posted by Kattullus at 4:18 PM on February 4

Just to point out these are not just random teachers. The few that I recognize from the history professions are well known at the top of their fields. John Merriman wrote a standard textbook on Early Modern European history used in colleges around the US, and Donald Kagan is a well known author with many books. I've read both of these authors so being able to watch them teach is pretty neat.
posted by stbalbach at 5:23 PM on February 4

Excellent. I have wanted to find a site like this for ages. There's quite a few similar sites out there, but they all have poor navigation and usability, something this site excels at. I've been thinking a lot that the world needs to work harder to distribute knowledge for free to level the playing field in society and sites like these represent a huge step forward.
posted by HaloMan at 3:52 AM on February 5

OH YES A WHOLE COURSE ABOUT DEATH!

(Why no, I'm not morbid, thanks for asking.)
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:50 AM on February 5

No one likes the grammar/spelling police, but since it was my alma mater; it is spelled 'Berkeley' (3 e's).
posted by pseudodoc at 10:38 AM on February 6