YouTube EDU and Academic Earth

YouTube recently released a new section of their website that brings together all of the content that’s been posted to YouTube from various universities. The address is simple: https://www.youtube.com/edu

Duke has had several YouTube channels for some time. This recent development doesn’t change the official YouTube channels – it just brings them all together in a more readily available way. For more information on adding content to the Duke YouTube channel, see OIT’s information page.

Not unlike iTunesU and YouTubeEDU, Academic Earth is attempting to provide freely available educational resources via online video. So far, they only have a handful of universities involved (Harvard, Stanford, etc), but seem to be growing.

Some have called Academic Earth the ‘Hulu‘ of online educational video. This isn’t completely unfounded, as it looks like Academic Earth focuses on including higher quality content over a higher volume of content (their tagline is “Video lectures from the world’s top scholars”). It also doesn’t hurt that their video interface looks very similar to Hulu’s (they even have a ‘dim the lights’ feature that black out the screen around the video).

Academic Earth also includes a few other interesting features. The ability to cite a video (see image above), the text of which could be easily copy/pasted into a student’s paper, is a step in the right direction. Videos can downloaded in an iPod friendly mp4 format, and there’s also the ability to embed the video in your own blog or website, just like YouTube videos. There’s also an interesting system for rating videos -they get a grade.