Free Ivy League Lecture Videos for Everyone!

I have been checking out a new site that has launched, “Academic Earth.”  I will just say it outright—this is a dream come true.

Academic Earth is a site where anyone-anytime-anywhere can come and watch full-length video recordings of lectures from leading universities: Princeton, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Stanford.  The lectures span the full spectrum of a liberal arts curriculum, ranging from economics to astronomy, medicine to theology.

Not surprisingly, I looked at the offerings in the “Religion” department.  At first I was dismayed to see that there was only one offering: Yale’s intro class on the Old Testament.  But then I realized that it was in fact a full-length COURSE, including a whopping 24 lectures running at 45 minutes each!

I have listened to only the first one, but it is very, very good.  The material is decidedly not evangelical, but it is a university and not a seminary, after all.  As a matter of fact, I think it is a sad fact that a Christian will get a better education from a secular university on the Christian Bible than perhaps a seminary can offer on the same subject—and I firmly believe that.

But perhaps what I’m most thrilled about is the liberal arts curriculum.  I took my liberal arts classes straight after high school, and despite whizzing through every class with a 4.0 GPA, I didn’t learn a single thing.  So this will give me the opportunity to refresh all those subjects that went in one ear and out the other!

From the site:

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone.

Now I can stop hunting through YouTube for all those “how-to” videos…

(HT: Church Leader Links)