Academic Earth is a website launched on March 24, 2009, by Richard Ludlow and co-founders Chris Bruner and Liam Pisano,[1][2] which offers free online video courses and academic lectures from the world's top universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.
[3] It is considered a search engine for full-text scholarly information, with video courses covering around 50 primary subject disciplines[4] ranging from Arts and Design, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Humanities, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, and Statistics.
[5] The idea behind Academic Earth came to Ludlow upon stumbling on a full video course lecture from MIT Mathematics Professor Gilbert Strang.
[2] The platform is also likened to what Google was trying to do with its defunct Knol project,[6] which aggregated scholarly articles.
[7][8] The website also offers online courses, but unlike their formal versions, Academic Earth only publishes sorted video courses and sends users to the academic institutions offering them if they wish to complete it.