Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56535
One Stop for Free Online Ed Academic Earth, a social entrepreneurship venture founded by Richard Lud- low, now offers free access to online video of full courses and guest lec- tures from a range of educational institutions, including University of California, Berkeley, and the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford universities. Although most coursework hails from the arts and sciences, students can download a range of courses and lectures on economics from Princeton and UC-Berkeley, and courses on entrepreneurship from Stanford and Yale. Ludlow had the idea for the site as an economics student at Yale, when he was having trouble in his linear algebra course. When he went online for help, he found MIT's Open- CourseWare Web site. "Not only did I have access to supplementary instruction, I got to learn from Pro- fessor Gilbert Strang, one of the most renowned teachers in the field and the author of the textbook used in our course," he realized. While many universities were offering free courses online, Ludlow realized that those resources were dispersed and saved in varying file formats, making it difficult for stu- dents to find them all. So, after grad- uating from Yale, Ludlow deferred his admission to Harvard Business School to launch Academic Earth. In February, the site attracted more than 200,000 unique visitors from 207 different countries. Lec- tures in business, computer science, and engineering are among the site's most popular. Users can hear from a variety of high-level guest lectur- ers such as Google co-founder Larry Page, Facebook founder Mark Zuck- erberg, and New York Times colum- nist and author Thomas Friedman. The site is meant to be a "single user-friendly ecosystem" for stu- dents who want to supplement their coursework, faculty who want to study the teaching methods of other instructors, and lifelong learners who want to learn new subjects, says Ludlow. Students also can assess the quality of lectures by assigning them letter grades, from A to F; the aver- Portals Open to Academics The Internet is increasingly becoming a tool for collaboration, idea exchange, and networking, a trend not lost on top technology companies. Two organizations— online retail giant Amazon and software company SAP—have recently launched portals designed specifically to attract the participation of the academic community. For its part, SAP recently opened its interactive Web portal for higher edu- cation at www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/uac. The SAP University Alliance commu- nity comes complete with a career services center, faculty club, student union, library, and classrooms to provide the feel of a traditional university campus in a virtual environment. In each area, users can find lectures, case studies, exercises, video demonstra- tions, forums, and blogs. All are designed to provide opportunities for faculty and students to collaborate with each other and network with the larger SAP online community, which already has more than 1.5 million users. The goal of the portal, say SAP officials, is to develop skills and provide career opportunities to those in the academic community. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has created AWS in Education, an infrastructure designed to help educators teach advanced courses and conduct research in distributed computing, artificial intelligence, data structures, data storage, and other computer-based subjects. It also offers self-directed learning resources for students interested in cloud computing. AWS is offering teaching grants to faculty of $100 per student for free usage, for up to one year. Faculty can apply for these grants or find more information at aws.amazon.com/education. BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2009 59 age of those grades appears under the name of the professor and course. Academic Earth plans to continue to grow its content, drawing on open-source information and part- nerships with additional universities, think tanks, conferences, govern- ment agencies, and educational tele- vision programs. For more information, visit www. academicearth.org.