Academic Earth: Lectures from Scholars

Academic Earth is proud to announce that it received more than one million visits in the first three months since its January 18 beta launch, with more than 50% of users coming from outside of the US. You can see more details and learn about the most popular subjects, courses, and lectures over that time frame in this presentation. _Academic Earth

Academic Earth - One Million Visits

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Academic Earth is but one of many online sites offering high quality academic lectures on demand at no cost. In The Impending Demise of the University (h/t Simoleon Sense), Don Tapscott looks at many reasons why current incarnations of the university are likely to grow extinct, due to competition from the internet and other technologies.

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

...These universities are vulnerable, especially at a time when students can watch lectures online for free by some of the world's leading professors on sites like Academic Earth. They can even take the entire course online, for credit. According to the Sloan Consortium, a recent article in Chronicle of Higher Education tells us, "nearly 20 per cent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 each year." _Edge