Richard Ludlow, founder of the video-lecture sharing Academic Earth, preferred answering some questions to writing a Guest Contribution, which was fine by me.
My questions and Richard's responses are below.
1. What is your development horizon for the service?
RL. We just recently opened our beta site to the public, and started with a basic feature set that focuses on making it easy for people to find and learn from great video content from top universities. Our plan is to add a number of complementary features over the next 2-6 months, particularly focusing on leveraging community participation to enhance the content and offer a richer learning experience. Right now we're trying to gather as much feedback as possible so we can develop the tools that users will find most valuable.
2. Where the money is coming from now, and what is your longer term business model?
RL. We raised a small seed round from a group of Yale professors and others with a deep interest in education. The lead investor was Professor Barry Nalebuff, who was my professor and advisor at Yale, and who has had success as an entrepreneur himself as the co-founder of Honest Tea. We're a mission-driven organization focused on expanding educational opportunities for people around the world, so we don't plan to charge for access to the content; we'll likely earn revenue down the road by connecting people to complementary educational products and services.
3. What are your plans to give Academic Earth a less US-centric feel (for example, in the UK the term "Instructor" is often used in the context of vocational training, and it is not used in connection with university-level learning).
RL. That's interesting - I wasn't aware there was a difference in connotations between the two countries for that word. We actually use that term since some of our speakers - such as guest lecturers from the business world - aren't actually professors, so it's a bit more inclusive.
But speaking more broadly, our goal is to bring together a truly international collection of content that is valuable to a global audience. I know that Cambridge, Oxford, and LSE all have some great collections of video content (as I'm sure do other UK universities), and we're planning to reach out to these schools to offer to share their collections with our users. Beyond seeking to attract more content from universities around the world, we're also researching translation tools to make our English-language content available to a broader global audience, and allow English-speaking users to view foreign-language videos.
4. What process is there, or do you plan, for teachers with "great stuff" to contribute to have it included on the site, and how do you decide what to include?
RL. That's a great question. Certainly one would want to be able to access the highest quality educational resources regardless of the source. The challenge comes in building the appropriate ecosystem so that the "great stuff" rises to the top and users don't have sort through lower-quality materials in order to find it. We believe that it will be possible for us to accomplish this with the right implementation of community interaction tools, and plan to gradually phase in more and more opportunities for people to add in quality educational content to complement our initial core of lectures.
I already wrote to Academic Earth and suggested they tap into some of the great (English language) videos available from India, both from IITs and from Indira Gandhi Open University (http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/12/04/worlds-largest-university-opens-almost-all-its-materials/)
Stian
Posted by: Stian Haklev | 30/01/2009 at 22:55
I think it's a great adventure and move. I and my partner (Dr. M. Usman Ghani) have been working on the similar idea called Learning Universe for more than a year. I am glad Richard Ludlow moved fast. M. Afzal
Posted by: M. Afzal | 17/02/2009 at 17:09