That’s what Richard Ludlow, the founder of Academic Earth, noticed when looking for help in linear Algebra. He did found a full video course online by MIT professor Gilbert Strang as well as other courses offered by other universities.

An idea to aggregate all those educational videos came to his mind and Academic Earth was founded.

Academic Earth is an educational video portal that aggregates free lectures and instructions from academic universities like Standford, MIT, Yale or Harvard.

The goal of Academic Earth is to provide free access to high quality educational videos. A total of 60 full courses and almost 2400 lecturers have already been made available on the website with additional videos being added frequently to the site.

Lectures and courses can be accessed by subject, university, instructors or playlists. Available subjects include computer science, law, economics and medicine among others.

Playlists are pre-compiled collections of lectures selected by editors that are based on specific themes like first day of a freshman year, the nature of evil or money makes the world go round.

The interface of Academic Earth is simply but sufficient. Some users might miss social features such as commenting on lectures, a discussion forum, custom playlists or a company blog which would add to the use of the site in the long run.

Lectures that are part of a course link to the other parts of the course from the individual video pages making it easy to follow the course. There is also an interesting dim the lights feature that darkens everything on the screen but the lecture itself making it easier to follow.

All courses and lectures offered are from US-American universities and therefor offered in the English language. It would be nice if lectures and courses from foreign universities would be a welcome addition.

The Open CourseWare Movement allows students to find courses online that fit their needs. Because of the large amount of schools currently serving free online classes, students can choose from literally thousands of courses. These aren’t just your every day, run of the mill colleges either! Universities such as MIT, Yale, and Stanford are among those that offer free courses online. Even colleges and universities in different countries such as Japan, Israel, and Spain are participating in the program. Because of this, many courses are offered in languages other than English.

For a college to qualify for the Open CourseWare program, they must offer at least 10 courses free online. The courses must contain everything a student needs, including the reading material (students who use this don’t have to pay for books) for it to be a part of the program. Whether it’s a class taken for fun or to learn something new, it’s a good idea for students to look for classes from universities known particularly for that course or major. This helps ensure that the student will get the best education they can. Different courses are taught in different ways. Many courses have video lectures, just audio, or just course transcripts. It’s important for those looking to take a class through the Open CourseWare program to look for classes that fit their needs such as a video class for those who learn better visually than by reading.

The goal of the Open CourseWare Movement is to get as many colleges and universities to participate as possible so that more people are given the chance to learn online. There are many ways that those who’ve benefited from the Open CourseWare Movement can help such as donating, passing on the word, or just taking a course to better themselves. It is usually a good idea to open a search engine and search for “open courseware” to find universities and colleges that offer these free courses.

That’s were Vanishd comes into play. The service hides your private website by placing a authorized websites, for example Google Search, in front of it. Don’t worry, it’s not about placing a browser window over another browser window which could be done manually as well. It’s about merging two browser windows and providing a link to a sneak peak window that lets you watch through the first authorized browser window to view the second.

Vanishd adds a button to the first window. Once that button is pressed it will provide access to a rectangular are that can be moved with the mouse that shows the contents of the private website.

The user can change the size of the viewing window with the mouse wheel and the viewing window will automatically disappear if he moves the mouse out of the browser window or right-click in view mode.

View mode is the default mode that allows you to view the contents of the hidden page. If you want to interact with it you need to click the left mouse button which switches to interactive mode. This mode allows you to interact with the website normally.

The officially supported browsers are Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox 2. Firefox 3 is available in experimental mode and seems to make some troubles with flash contents.

Some websites do not work with Vanishd including Google Mail or Yahoo Mail. It should also be noted that the contents of the hidden website will appear in the browser cache.

Each section is divided into two subsections that link to the presentations and videos. The Powerpoint presentations have to be downloaded to your computer while the videos are embedded on the website itself. Most tutorials on the website are clearly aimed at users with some background knowledge.

If you take a look at the C++ tutorials in the Language section you see that they are not beginners tutorials for instance. The first tutorial is named C++ Threads while the second and last New Features in the Next C++ Standard. Nothing a beginner to C++ programming would want to start with.

The videos however are excellent, the C++ Threads video for instance has a playtime of 1 hour 29 minutes. Strangely though the other video which was hosted on Youtube is not available anymore which is the only video that was not available. All other videos were hosted on Google Video and ran fine.

The website has a Curriculum Search as well which should help to find teaching material. It’s basically a custom Google search.

All classes are in American or British English depending on the University or school that hosts the course. Most courses do not simply display textual contents but also multimedia like audio recordings, videos and flash presentations. The list has some links to even more courses at the end including a link to 1800 Open Courseware courses at the MIT for instance.

I guess this is an excellent opportunity to take courses that you are interested in without having to actually attend University or pay a fee. No signups are required either to access the courses.

Not all podcasts are like radio shows of course, some look much more like audio lessons, like university courses without the classes. And this is what I will be talking about now. I found a great website that has three large lists of links to websites that offer podcasts that teach you something. That something is either languages, cultur or university courses. It is up to you of course to decide what you want to learn and hear, just download all the podcasts you like and transfer them to your mp3 player. All podcasts are encoded in mp3 format which makes it possible to have even large lessons take up just some megabytes.

Let us take a look at the three possibilities:

Languages: Links to podcasts that teach you 14 languages including German, French and Japanese. Most of the courses are for beginners, I suggest you read the explanation at the website that compiled the list before you download the podcasts.

University Courses: A compilation of links to colleges and universities (US) that offer free podcasts of some of their lectures. You find a wide variety of courses such as law and social sciences.

Culture: Many links to interesting podcasts and even audio texts. Concentrates on art, pop culture and media. Great.